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On the sporadic nature of my posts...
Jan. 13th, 2001 07:03 amLast year, I was able to keep a date with my keyboard every day for over half a year, including those days when I was away from home. This year, out of the first dozen days of the year, I've not posted anything at all on seven of them.
I got to wondering why, which is to say, I reflected a bit to try to understand why I have suddenly stopped regularly making journal entries after having developed the habit of doing so.
But first, a bit about the past couple of days.
Tooling along a couple of days ago in the Olds that Feht has lent to me, I heard a cellular phone radio ad that advertised 2600 minutes per month for $39.95, together with a Motorola StarTAC phone for $29. Having met the local Verizon rep in the store and obtained his card, I gave him a call. He came out to the store, took my information, and disappeared, returning a couple of hours later with a charged phone and a contract. Now that's service, by any standard.
I've met a lot of old friends in the store. For example, my old flight instructor, and ex-F-14 driver, stopped by the other day, and we both looked forward to a dinner last night at a place here in town called the "Hog's Breath Saloon" (hey, this is a tourist town!) that was being arranged by Feht on the eve of his vacation.
Ken, my former instructor, is one of these people who can make an airplane seem alive; when he was at the controls during my tutelage, the Cherokee we were flying in responded crisply and smartly to his sure hand. Unfortunately, there was not enough business in town to support a flight school, so Ken and his partner eventually called it quits and his partner - who owned the plane - moved somewhere down south.
At any rate, the plan last night was for a few people to get together and have some good food and good company, but some part of the storm that has been moving east from the Pacific coast finally reached Pagosa late in the afternoon, and Feht called about 5:30 pm to tell me that he was in a "whiteout" condition out where he was (you can barely see your hood ornament, and can't see the road at all), and that unfortunately the evening was off.
If it was bad out where Feht lives, driving conditions near me were nearly as miserable. I live probably 2.5 miles from the store, and the condition of the highway was a repeat of several nights before, where a speed of 25 mph was near the threshold of recklessness. The mile or so from the highway to my turnoff was even slower, since I could barely distinguish the road from the rest of the landscape.
I had spent most of the day rearranging the store's stock in the back room. I won't bore you with the details, but the problem in the back room is not all that dissimilar from the problem faced by the ISS crew: how to find things that have been tucked away into odd corners. The ISS crew has the benefit of bar-code readers and a dedicated computer; so far, I've been scribbling notes on paper, along with these little maps that show where things are. In any event, you can now move about more freely in the back room, and that's good.
Learning to sort mail is not as easy as it may seem. It turns out that the box number that's supposed to be used on mail is not a very reliable indicator of where to put what. Instead, you have to associate names (and there can be two or three) with each box.
Both the inventory location problem and the mail sorting problem appear to be ideal candidates for me to apply mnemotechniques, however, it is even more important for me to figure out how to make this easy for the other staff members to pickup (most of them are new to this, with only a few weeks head start on me).
There's a stray dog that hangs out behind the shopping center where the shop is located. It is a beautiful dog, looks a little like a husky, I think, but no male person can get near it (at least, not without a fistful of meat, as I found out personally). Drew thinks the animal has been abused, and I tend to agree with him, as the dog will run up to women and allow itself to be petted.
No amount of coaxing or prodding, however, will convince the animal to even come within three feet of anyone else, and the idea of getting it into a car...well...it's going to have to be by main force, which is what the humane society folks will do.
I think I'll check with the humane society in a few days to see if they have picked up this pooch.
So, why don't I LJ every day, as before? I'd say that about 50% of the time, it's because I'm doing something else (building a cash analysis spreadsheet, designing a box occupancy database), and the other 50% of the time, it's because I don't feel like it.
And that's okay by me.
I got to wondering why, which is to say, I reflected a bit to try to understand why I have suddenly stopped regularly making journal entries after having developed the habit of doing so.
But first, a bit about the past couple of days.
Tooling along a couple of days ago in the Olds that Feht has lent to me, I heard a cellular phone radio ad that advertised 2600 minutes per month for $39.95, together with a Motorola StarTAC phone for $29. Having met the local Verizon rep in the store and obtained his card, I gave him a call. He came out to the store, took my information, and disappeared, returning a couple of hours later with a charged phone and a contract. Now that's service, by any standard.
I've met a lot of old friends in the store. For example, my old flight instructor, and ex-F-14 driver, stopped by the other day, and we both looked forward to a dinner last night at a place here in town called the "Hog's Breath Saloon" (hey, this is a tourist town!) that was being arranged by Feht on the eve of his vacation.
Ken, my former instructor, is one of these people who can make an airplane seem alive; when he was at the controls during my tutelage, the Cherokee we were flying in responded crisply and smartly to his sure hand. Unfortunately, there was not enough business in town to support a flight school, so Ken and his partner eventually called it quits and his partner - who owned the plane - moved somewhere down south.
At any rate, the plan last night was for a few people to get together and have some good food and good company, but some part of the storm that has been moving east from the Pacific coast finally reached Pagosa late in the afternoon, and Feht called about 5:30 pm to tell me that he was in a "whiteout" condition out where he was (you can barely see your hood ornament, and can't see the road at all), and that unfortunately the evening was off.
If it was bad out where Feht lives, driving conditions near me were nearly as miserable. I live probably 2.5 miles from the store, and the condition of the highway was a repeat of several nights before, where a speed of 25 mph was near the threshold of recklessness. The mile or so from the highway to my turnoff was even slower, since I could barely distinguish the road from the rest of the landscape.
I had spent most of the day rearranging the store's stock in the back room. I won't bore you with the details, but the problem in the back room is not all that dissimilar from the problem faced by the ISS crew: how to find things that have been tucked away into odd corners. The ISS crew has the benefit of bar-code readers and a dedicated computer; so far, I've been scribbling notes on paper, along with these little maps that show where things are. In any event, you can now move about more freely in the back room, and that's good.
Learning to sort mail is not as easy as it may seem. It turns out that the box number that's supposed to be used on mail is not a very reliable indicator of where to put what. Instead, you have to associate names (and there can be two or three) with each box.
Both the inventory location problem and the mail sorting problem appear to be ideal candidates for me to apply mnemotechniques, however, it is even more important for me to figure out how to make this easy for the other staff members to pickup (most of them are new to this, with only a few weeks head start on me).
There's a stray dog that hangs out behind the shopping center where the shop is located. It is a beautiful dog, looks a little like a husky, I think, but no male person can get near it (at least, not without a fistful of meat, as I found out personally). Drew thinks the animal has been abused, and I tend to agree with him, as the dog will run up to women and allow itself to be petted.
No amount of coaxing or prodding, however, will convince the animal to even come within three feet of anyone else, and the idea of getting it into a car...well...it's going to have to be by main force, which is what the humane society folks will do.
I think I'll check with the humane society in a few days to see if they have picked up this pooch.
So, why don't I LJ every day, as before? I'd say that about 50% of the time, it's because I'm doing something else (building a cash analysis spreadsheet, designing a box occupancy database), and the other 50% of the time, it's because I don't feel like it.
And that's okay by me.
