Secret to a Long Life

A doctor on his morning walk, noticed the old lady above, sitting on her front step Smoking a cigar, so he walked up to her and said, "I couldn't help but notice how happy you look! What is your secret?"

"I smoke ten cigars a day," she said. "Before I go to bed, I smoke a nice big joint. Apart from that, I drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels every week, and eat only junk food. On weekends, I pop pills, get laid, and don't exercise at all."

"That is absolutely amazing! How old are you?"

"Thirty-four," she replied.

Ho Ho Oh No

I have been awake since 3am this morning. I took off a day at work to focus all my energy today toward accomplishing one pressing mission.....start and complete my Christmas shopping. I managed to return home with my shirt, but that's about it. I'm now officially poor. Oh well....tis the season...I guess.

I hate Christmas shopping. I'm not very good at it. I'm not very good at shopping period but I'm especially inept at trying to figure out gifts for women. Specifically women I'm fond of. More specifically, my wife. If left to my own devices, my idea of efficient Christmas shopping would be to go to the Kwikie Mart late Christmas Eve and buy a lottery ticket, cigarette lighter, and a handful of Slim Jims....tastefully wrapping them in the plastic bag provided. I need direction. I require precise instructions.

Ya see, I ask my wife what she would like for Christmas and her response is "Oh, nothing, really".

Yeah...right....this isn't my first rodeo and I know that when a woman says she doesn't want a gift, you better damn well get a gift and it better be just exactly what she always wanted. So off I trudge to all the stores to buy things that she has eyeballed all year but never bought for herself. No clothes though and no dainty drawers. I've mentioned several times the danger of misjudging the size of your beloved. She doesn't like jewelry so that nixes an easy option. I got her some kitchen appliances because she really likes to cook and I, of course, really like to eat. I bought a few power tools because she is using her enforced early retirement to do home repairs. I'm probably the first man in history to buy his wife a miter saw with the intent of actually giving it to her instead of keeping it for himself. Various goodies for the stocking and a laptop, so we won't fight over access to a computer.

Thank goodness I don't have to worry about this for another 360 days.

Calories Are Calories

Well....no, not really. Technically they are all the same just like pounds or gallons are all the same. Calorie is just a measurement and has no value in itself beyond that which it is used to measure.

This is where I've fooled myself in the past. Counting calories is a good way of managing or losing weight. It is a fact that if you take in less calories than you burn...weight will decline. Similarly, if you take in more than you burn...you get fatter. Not exactly rocket science, but there is nothing so simple that I can't tweak out of all proportion and make complicated.

Fer instance, I've done this: This bag of chips has nearly 300 calories so I can skip a meal and still be on track. I can go out an have a burger because I didn't have breakfast. Or the ever popular....I've stayed on my daily caloric goal even though all I ate today was cake and soda pop, whoohoo!

Calories are calories and it's reasonable to count them...but how the body extracts those calories is another story. When you look at the photo above of that delicious doughnut bacon cheeseburger, do you see a reasonable calorie count for a meal or something that makes your arteries quiver? I could eat one of these every day and still fall way below the number of calories to lose lots of weight.

Think I would?

Monday Cat Blogging

How Long Must I Dream?

One of the interesting features about the GoWear armband is that it can track my sleeping behavior. The little graph bar on the screen shot above shows me that, last night, I went to bed a little before 10pm and woke up about 5:30am.

Okay....I know what you are thinking....whoop tee doo....who needs a little gadget to tell you what time you go to bed and wake up? Well, it does a little more. It knows the difference between me just laying in the bed and when I am actually doing some sleeping. It shows periods of sleep interspersed with short minutes of turning over or briefly waking up during the night. It appears that I sleep like a log for a couple of hours on either side of a couple of minutes of light sleep, then toss around more and more frequently waking up three or four times during the last hour before I actually get out of bed.

It is so freaking cool!

It's also telling me that I'm not sleeping as much as I thought...which may explain a host of problems I sometimes have with feeling tired and drained at times during some days. I may have to fiddle with changing when I go to bed, or wake up, or consider (shudder) cutting back on my caffeine consumption.

New Toy

This is just about the coolest thing I've gotten for myself in a long time. It's a gadget you wear on your arm to measure your activity day and night. Then you can download it on your computer and get all kinds of neat statistical information on calories burned, calories eaten, and even the efficiency of your sleep cycles. These things are more commonly called Bodybuggs, but the one I have is called GoWear fit ...though it's made from the same company, is virtually identical, and has the bonus of being a bit less expensive.

Speaking of...it isn't cheap. This little goober costs about $150 plus a $7 monthly subscription to the website that crunches the numbers. I think it's worth it. This isn't a pedometer or heart rate monitor, it actually measures how you move. So far, it appears to be scary accurate. I'm hoping that this will be a big help in getting a handle on what I do for weight loss and fitness....rather than just kinda guessing at what I do and what I need to do.

Losing One's Health

I finished watching the finale episode of this season's Biggest Loser. In case you live in a cave, it's one of those reality shows that gathers up a group of morbidly obese people and they have a race to see who can lose the most weight every week. I like the show. It's fun to watch and I find myself rooting for my favorites along with everybody else. It's entertainment...but it is a show first with very little attention to reality.

I watched the finalists get up on the scales to see who would win the grand prize. They all said that they felt great. They didn't look like it though. They all looked like they were about to fall over at any moment. The winner...though losing over half of his body weight and winning a quarter million dollars...looked as if he felt absolutely miserable.

Here's what I think the problem is; losing a great deal of weight in a short amount of time is not healthy. In fact, it may do far more damage to your body than doing nothing at all about being very overweight. Every week on the show there are contestants who lose 8, 10, 12 or more pounds and they do this week after week. Now, granted, somebody that weighs in at over 400 pounds, this is not too big of a percentage of their total weight....but I do kind of wonder if the weight loss is coming from the fat or if their bodies are cannibalizing themselves.

Ya see...fat is hard to get rid of. The body doesn't want to give it up. The body would much rather give up a little muscle than part with fat because of simple survival. If the body runs out of food, it can go a lot longer living off the fat reserves than the muscle. It's like money.....you tend to spend the money you have in your checking account rather than go into your savings all the time. The savings account is for lean times. It's what you access last.

I dunno. It just seems that weight loss has taken priority over health gain. Sure it's a part of getting healthy and weight is a good measure of progress.

But it's not the end all be all. I'm dying to lose weight....but I'm not going to die getting there.

Time To Do a Little Thinking

I've avoided commenting here about the so-called climate gate thing that has been going on. Years of experience trying to have an intelligent discussion with people who don't understand evolution theory has left a bad taste in my mouth about logical discourse with those who gain their science education from radio talk show hosts or the pulpit.

Still....this clip is pretty good. As old Paul Harvey use to say, "now for the rest of the story".

Don't believe what you are told by the media. Take the time to investigate. Do a bit of thinking for yourself.

Monday Cat Blogging

Ding a Ling

Okay...I know I run the risk of being labeled a Scrooge....but I'm about at the end of my rope with these Christmas bell ringers.

They're everywhere, in front of stores flailing away with their hand bell beside a little red bucket. Now I have nothing against the Salvation Army. I have nothing against them wanting to raise a bit of money, especially during a time of year when a lot of people are feeling more generous than normal. I certainly have nothing against those manning the buckets having what must be a desperately needed job.

But do they have to ring that damn bell?

DING DING DING DINGLE DING DING DING

Earlier today...during a fun-filled morning shopping with the herd...I developed a massive headache and feeling jolly was about the furthest thing from my mind. As I was walking up to the entrance of my grocery store, there he was...swinging that bell and yelling "Merry Christmas" to everybody within ten yards. I contemplated asking if he would sell me his bell for twenty bucks but I'm afraid all I did was scowl at the poor slob as I walked past him.

Probably getting coal in my stocking for that.

Monday Cat Blogging

Black Friday....Shop Till it Hurts

It's a peculiar phenomenon. Every year, retail stores compete with each other to entice shoppers into their stores on the Friday following Thanksgiving. With Christmas being the time most of us spend a good chunk of any money we have on gifts and whatnot...retailers pull out all the stops to try and get you to spend at their stores before you bust your bank account or max out your cards.

Hence there are the super duper door busting special sales. Special is a key word here. The really fantastic bargains are available in limited quantity with no rain checks. What this creates is a horde of hundreds lined up awaiting the opening of a store to buy, say, a plasma T.V. for twenty bucks...when there are maybe two of them in the store. It's called "bait and switch" and is the oldest marketing scam in the book. You have to ask yourself why a retail store, with a warehouse the size of a football field and spending millions on advertising a particular item, would only carry a couple of that same sale item in the store. The answer is simple....get you and your money inside and then separate the two.

I've also noticed another trend...stores opening earlier and earlier. You see, when all the stores open up at the same time people have the opportunity to shop and compare. Can't have any of that because in retail, it's definitely first come first serve when it comes to getting that increasingly scarce consumer dollar. So some stores started opening a bit earlier...like 6am. Then some started earlier....like 5am. This year I saw that many were opening at 3 in the morning and I believe a couple even opened at midnight.

I feel sorry for the poor slobs who work in the store. Many years ago I worked at Target and got to experience my first Black Friday event. I worked as a stocker at that time and had spent the pre-opening hours unloading a truck and putting stuff on shelves. The intercom announced that the store was opening and I immediately heard a low rumble. I looked up and saw a crowd of people literally running down the aisle straight toward me. I dived into the stockroom afraid for my life and hoping to stay there for the rest of the day. No such luck. My boss drafted me to run the cash registers and, after thirty seconds of training, I was on the thing until the store closed at night.

I can imagine how much it sucks for employees to be dragged to work so they can open a store at three in the morning, put up with insane crowds of pissed off people who waited for hours to buy a sale item that was gone withing ten seconds of opening. So....if you're going out to participate in the consumer feeding frenzy today....smile at the person wearing the red or blue shirt and name tag. No matter how crappy your day is, it's a good bet that theirs is much worse and started much sooner.

Thanksgiving Zen Walk

Not Everybody Enjoys Thanksgiving

I dunno, I've never really been all that thrilled with Thanksgiving. Sure it's grand to visit with family but there doesn't have to be a special day set aside every year for that and, if the family has some problems, the artificial get-together can be a bit uncomfortable. Two families that I married into and later divorced out of have left a bad taste in my mouth about sitting around trying to act like the Osmonds when the dynamics is more like the Osbournes.

Then there is the eating. Lots and lots of eating. Now, don't get me wrong, nobody likes to eat more than me and I can put the food away with the best of them. Yet that seems to be the focal point of this holiday...being thankful that one has the ability to load up a dining table with enough food to feed some families in the world for a month. Even the homeless and destitute get to join in with local charities spending massive amounts of their resources to make sure that everybody gets a chance to stuff themselves with turkey and gravy. I'm not sure the intent is to help them be thankful so much as grateful...a subtle difference.

Oh gosh...I sound like a grouchy old fart, don't I?

I do have some good Thanksgiving memories, more good ones than bad as a matter of fact. I miss my parents and my sister and Thanksgiving day with assorted relatives, some now gone. I miss my kids and their kids separated by time and distance.

I really miss my Mom's chicken and dressing. That's probably what bums me out the most.

Monday Cat Blogging

Great American Smokeout

No cigarettes.

Do it for one day.

I dare you.

One Pill Makes You Larger and One Pill Makes You Small

Medication is the answer to every problem these days. Feel depressed? There's a pill for that. Anxious? There's a pill. Overweight? Just take these pills. Sleepy, not sleepy, pain, aches, sneezes, sniffles, pee too much, not peeing enough, can't get it up....pop a pill and make everything all right.

What really aggravates me is the accepted treatment for any mental health issue by throwing meds at people. Now...I'm not one of those types that believe medications have no place in mental health treatment. I'm just of the opinion that they only treat symptoms. Kind of like taking an aspirin when you have a headache. Gives relief; but if you have pounding headaches every day, maybe you should look a bit closer at finding the cause rather than crunching down bottle after bottle of Excedrin. Same with depression. If you're taking an anti-depressant year after year, are you really getting a handle on dealing with your depression? If you take pain pills long enough, sometimes you may discover that the only pain you are relieving is that of not taking the pills. There is no end to the number of people I know who are suffering all the mental and emotional devastation of a drug addict but who are convinced that they are not addicts because...well...it's prescribed by my doctor for my back pain...it's medicine.

It's okay to feel depressed. It's normal to feel pain. Though there definitely are times when both can become so debilitating that we need some relief to continue functioning...many of us become so dependent upon fiddling with our brain chemistry that we forget how to manage our own feelings. Some no longer even know how they feel.

Sorry for the rant but I had to get this off my chest. Enough preaching. Just remember to keep your head.

Pay Up!

Monday Cat Blogging

Age is a Number

This is one of my early memories which, for some reason, also seem to be my most vivid. The Jack LaLanne Show. I watched this on a prehistoric black and white vacuum-tubed television every morning. Not because I had a particular interest in exercise shows but because when the show ended, I would yell at my Mom that it was time for me to go to kindergarten. It was one of the ways I could tell time before I learned the advanced skills of reading a clock. I watched the show, not really understanding why he was jumping around all over the place...but he had a cool dog that I always wanted for myself.

Jack LaLanne is still alive! Dang...the man is 95 years old and still in better shape than most people a quarter of his age. What's his secret? Pills? Supplements? A complex diet program? Makeup?

Exercise and eat wholesome foods.

That's it.

I've never been particularly concerned about getting older. My fear is of getting older and getting sicker. What's the point of living into your 60's, 70's, and beyond if your life consists of pain and infirmary? I want my body to feel good whether my life ends next week or I live to be a hundred.

I still want that dog too.

Face It

I'm starting to believe that something worse than a poor self-image is one seeped in delusion. Of course, focusing on your faults and failures can be a road to depression and, perhaps, even an increase in the behaviors that cause those negative aspects about ourselves. But...then again...it can also be a motivator to change.

Walking around and telling myself "I'm a bit overweight, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I'm not Faaaat! Not me. Lookit my arms...see how skinny they are?".

Don't look at my belly though. Don't ask me what my weight is this week. Don't comment about the closet full of triple X sized sweatshirts I wear every day to hide my body. Let me keep myself in ignorance about myself.

Trouble is, there isn't any bliss in that arrangement.

Score!

I love coffee. I love the taste of it and I love it rich and black. No sugar or creamer for me, and don't even try to give me any of that flavored crap. My favorite kind is Colombian. Not "Colombian roast" type knockoffs...but the real stuff...with the little seal of Juan Valdez and his donkey. Yet sometimes it seems as if it's easier to buy plutonium than my beloved Colombian coffee. There's always Folder's, but it goes at a premium price and is never ever on sale. Close to ten bucks for a 27.8 oz. plastic container.

Then, the other day, I was browsing in Big Lots. It's a great store. They have all kinds of items that you usually can't find anywhere else at very cheap prices. Most of the stuff is marketed for foreign stores and I suppose that, sometimes, the manufacturers decide it's more cost effective to unload to places like Big Lots rather than ship it to wherever. Anyway, on this particular day I spied Yuban Colombian coffee. $8 for a 44 oz. metal can.

I about passed out from excitement. Yuban is my favorite. You cannot find Yuban Colombian where I live. You certainly can't find any coffee in the old style big cans.

A once in a lifetime opportunity for coffee fiends.

I bought a dozen.

I'm going back today for more.

Monday Cat Blogging

Monday Cat Blogging

Money Get Back

What helps to keep me from not smoking is pondering all the positive aspects of life without cigarettes. I smell better, for one, both as far as my own body aroma and my ability to detect other fragrances is concerned. Food has more taste and I find that I get by with far less Tabasco sauce. I don't wake up in the morning hacking and coughing. I don't get one side of my face wet and cold when I drive in bad weather because there is no need to roll down a window for smoke to escape. I don't have to stand out in the rain at work sucking on a cig. I generally feel better with fewer headaches, sore throats, stuffed sinuses, etc, etc, etc.

I also don't have to spend money on cigarettes...and it's adding up....big time.

This habit cost me around $10 a day. I guess that's not much as far as addictions go. I know crack addicts that go through hundreds every day. Still, ten bucks is ten bucks.

$70 a week - that's a night out at a decent restaurant and a tank of gas. $280 a month - that's a car payment or the utility bills. $3360 a year - a pretty nice vacation. Over the years I've pissed away a great deal of money for cigarettes. It's time I stopped giving my hard earned cash to the tobacco industry.

Keep your hands off my stack, R.J. Reynolds.

On a Roll

I'm on my tenth day of not smoking. That's pretty good for me because the last several attempts at quitting, all I was able to manage was a couple of days...maybe three.

Do I think about smoking?

Hell yeah.

But I'm able to choose not to smoke and feel all right about it. It's been a very long time since I have been able to do that.

Monday Cat Blogging

One Week!

Seven days. No cigarettes. Not one. Not even a puff.

That may seem like no big deal to a lot of people and I know that I've pretty much devoted the whole week to yammering about not smoking...but this is a huge thing for me. I've been trying to quit for years. Usually I could do it for about 3 days before relapsing, with all the resulting frustration and guilt along with the bonus of an increase in the amount I smoked. It was a vicious cycle that I could not figure a way out of, and it was killing me.

Something clicked this time. I don't know what or how, but something is different about this attempt. Oh...there are still the urges, the temptations, the self-rationalizations; but it doesn't seem to have any power over me any more. At long last, I feel like I have control.

And....if I can control this....I can control other things about my body as well.

Adding Up

I really like the quitmeter thingie that is on the top of my blog here. I've always believed that if you don't have some way of tracking a goal, you may as well call it wishful thinking. The meter is an ongoing reminder of progress...real progress...especially for those times when it doesn't seem that I'm making any difference at all.

I look up at that quitmeter this morning, my sixth since my latest attempt to quit smoking. I'm facing the trial of going through the weekend. I'm facing increasingly intrusive thoughts of rationalizing smoking again. I get worried. Then I study on the meter. Nearly $50 saved. Well, that's good, but it's not like I'm impoverished and those nicotine patches and cinnamon toothpicks cost money too.

200 plus cigarettes not smoked.

Whoa. That's a carton. I went through a carton in five days? Two hundred cigarettes. Two hundred butts. Somewhere around a thousand times I inhaled smoke into my lungs. When did I become such a heavy smoker? Why did I let it go on for so long?

Here Come De Judge

I finally get a chance to use my abilities, expertise, and talent to the fullest at my job today. There is to be a chili cook-off in my department and I'm to be one of the judges. This might be a good thing because I love chili. It also might be a bad thing because I love chili....and my standards are pretty high. Kansans seem to have an aversion to spicy foods. For instance; what they call flaming hot salsa here in Kansas, they use in Texas to rub on a baby's gums to soothe them when they are teething.

I've also noticed that the chili in this neck of the woods seems to be very heavy on beans and light on the beef. That's not necessarily bad. I actually prefer my chili con frijoles. I'm not smoking today, so my senses will be sharper than usual and there won't be any unfortunate lighter accidents as I perform my judiciary duties.

Tell Me Lies.... Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Okay. I've completed three days without smoking. I've saved around $30 that I would have normally spent on cigarettes, which about covers the cost of nicotine patches for a week. My teeth are clean and my breath is nicely scented thanks to all the cinnamon toothpicks I've been chomping on. I can actually smell things again and can take a deep breath without feeling like my lungs are going to seize up on me. My smoker's cough is fading. I have more O2 in my blood and have a bit more energy during the day.

This is a dangerous time for me.

It's dangerous because all the immediate ill effects of smoking are fading and I only have memories of what I liked about smoking. This is the point when I start talking to myself and...when the addict voice talks...it lies.

and oh the lies I can lie to myself

"Go ahead and have one. You don't have to completely stop. If you just have one or two cigarettes a day, that will make it easier to quit. Well, (insert name of friend) smokes and they are perfectly healthy. You can smoke tomorrow because it will be a stressful day. Smoking keeps you from overeating."

and on, and on, and on.....with the always lurking whisper from that addict voice inside of me; "no one will ever know"

I've discovered that in this stage of the quitting process, I can find a lot of excuses to relapse. Everything from being stressed to being bored, they all sound good. The only way I've figured how to fight against those sweet little lies is to mentally shout "YOU LIE!" every time they pop up in my brain's self dialogue.

It's working for me so far.

I may start having to yell it out loud if my inner liar gets more persistent. That should make for interesting times at work.

Substitutes

This is what I put in my mouth three or four dozen times a day rather than a lit cigarette. It actually works pretty well for those especially tough times; like driving, talking to people who are smoking or smell like smoke, after a meal, watching TV, being on the computer, reading, sitting, standing,....come to think of it...just being awake. Hot little cinnamon toothpicks seem to do the trick and allows me to get past that momentary urge to light up a cig; and, really, the urge only lasts for a second or two.

I have a two tube a day habit now.

Counting Flowers on the Wall

The hard part, the really hard part about giving up cigarettes, is not so much giving up the cigarettes as giving up everything you've always done with cigarettes....or at least getting use to doing them without smoking.

Take mornings for instance. I'd always start my morning off with coffee and a few smokes. Now, I just have my coffee and stare dumbly into space while my right hand makes automatic movements to grab a non-existent pack and lighter. I drink coffee, I want a cigarette. I don't drink coffee, I want a cigarette even more. I want one if I check my email. I want one when I write on my blog. I want one if I read the paper. I want one when I turn on the TV. Thank goodness Captain Kangaroo is no longer on the air in the morning.

This is what makes giving up this particular addiction so difficult. If you've smoked for years, cigarettes become entrenched in virtually every aspect of your life. Take the cigarettes away and you're left with a lot of holes in your day and each and every one of them is a pit to fall back into relapsing. The real work in recovery is filling those holes...quickly. Leave them there for long and they will refill themselves with what use to be there. That is a fact that I've learned from the experience of several prior attempts.

Now, don't tell my I've nothing to do.

Monday Cat Blogging

 

I Have Way Too Much Free Time

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Boss Day

Okay...so I know that I often complain about my workload and the supervisor that gives it to me but, in actuality, I'm quite fond of both my job and my boss. My boss is pretty demanding. She expects a very high level of performance and, though it irritates me at times, it has made me excel in my profession. She also is probably one of the hardest working individuals in the agency where I am employed. My little domain of responsibility is puny compared to what she has to keep track of. I try to keep that in mind when I feel overwhelmed with my job. My boss has never demanded that others work harder than herself.

So happy boss day, Lisa. You don't even know about this blog so you'll never know that a primary reason I stay in your department is because I believe it's the best in the agency... and that's largely due to you.

Monday Cat Blogging

A Parable

I was with my wife this morning doing a bit of shopping at the local Walmart. I know, Wally World is not the socially/politically correct place to go; but I'm a working stiff who can't afford Whole Food Nation or the Gap. So, if you think I'm a bad liberal for shopping there, bite me.

Anyway...whilst I was wheeling out my cart of stuff to the parking lot and grumbling why coffee was over eight freaking bucks a can, I noticed a couple of young girls fighting over a balloon. Their mother was stashing bags of groceries in her car and the girls were really starting to go at each other.

"Lemme hold it!"

"No! It's mine!"

"But I wanna hold it too!"

"Mom!"

Mom turned to the girls with that look of soul shriveling fury that only a mother who has reached her limits can generate. Without saying a word, she reached over, grabbed the balloon, and let it go. The girls just stood there with their mouths open watching it drift away as the mom ordered both of them into the car.

There's a moral there, but I'll let you figure it out yourself.

It's What I Do

I have a lot of people ask me what I do for a living. It's really hard to talk much about my job, mainly because there is a lot of confidentiality involved. No...I'm not a secret agent or brothel madam; I just deal with people and the things I deal with are rather personal. What I can say is that I try and help others. The video below is probably the best way I can describe a typical work day without giving any details of what I do during the day. I go from place to place and attempt to keep bad things from happening to complete strangers. Most of the time, like the guy in the video, I'm perceived as something of an asshole by those who don't understand what I'm doing and why and that I probably saved them from disaster.

It's what I do.

...and I wouldn't do anything else

I Love Coffee

I really do. I've been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I'd mix it up with creamer and sugar and always thought it was a great treat. Now...before you go off on my parents for letting me do this, keep in mind that it's probably a much better option than soda pop. Plus the caffeine most likely tamed my ADD tendencies without the need for the amphetamine pills they throw at every kid these days who show the slightest hint of being energetic.

Later on, I rejected the cream and sugar to take my coffee straight up black. I loved the flavor. I loved the smell. Even in the Navy, where the coffee was usually strong enough to take the paint off a bulkhead, I drank it by the gallon. Wherever I have lived, the one appliance that I considered a necessity of life was a coffee pot. If I was broke, I bought coffee over food....in fact...there were times I used coffee to kill hunger because I didn't have any food.

I love coffee. I've tried to limit my consumption by drinking tea once in awhile. I like tea, but it just doesn't do quite what I need. I've tried de-caff but it tastes terrible and my brain isn't fooled one little bit, usually giving me a grand headache until I deliver the real stuff.

Coffee rules my day.

Monday Cat Blogging

Just What is it that I Really Want?

From the time we are born, we all want things. At first, it's pretty simple. You want to be warm. You want to be fed. You want to be dry. Not much but I think it's the start of a life-long path of confusing what we want most with what we want at the moment. In the beginning, it's all the same. Later on in life....it gets complicated.

Try an experiment sometime. Ask a kid what they want to be when he or she grows up. You'll hear some lofty goals and enthusiastic passion that you won't find in many adults. Now, take that same kid to a candy store and ask what they want.

Different answer.

Instant gratification. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Biologically, it's a good survival instinct. Those that take advantage of opportunities when they come across them tend to have a better chance at surviving. Not so great a thing when what you want at the moment interferes with what you want the most. Eating lots of food when it might be a long time before the next meal..good. Eating lots of food because there is lots of food...not good.

This is a problem that I deal with almost every day. The decision as to whether I want something now or maintain what I want the most; which may take a very long time to obtain, if ever. Success is the continuation toward a goal with the knowledge of what must be traded in day to day desire. Do I want a piece of pie or do I want to have a flat belly? Do I want to watch my favorite television show or do I want to be physically fit? Do I want a cigarette or do I want to have a healthy life?

What do I want the most?

Who Needs a Life?

I am beginning to think that the primary duty of a supervisor is to delegate their work load to others. At least it seems that way to me. When my team is down several members, our supervisors leap into action and assign us to cover the shortfall. When reports on their departments have to be in ASAP my supervisors selfishly remain at their office for an extra five minutes past quitting time to write an email instructing me to get them done yesterday.

I'm drowning in paperwork....mine and that of my supervisors in my management heavy agency.

Is it the weekend yet?

$100 Winner