Tag: Misc (Page 5 of 11)

A few Monday notes to kick off the week.

• Today I should cross over the halfway point in my NaNoWriMo project, keeping me exactly on schedule. Last night I got up to 24,491 words, which according to the stats-o-matic tracker on the NaNoWriMo site, would have me finishing one day early if I continue my pace.
• NFL. Who in the heck is the best team in the league? The answer was Pittsburgh coming into this week, and then New England made them look silly last night. I still don’t trust New England’s defense, though. The Jets really should be more dominant to make the claim they’re the best. The Giants? Not after yesterday. There’s something about the Chargers’ balance that makes me think they should get the nod.
• The Colts got a huge break with Tennessee and Houston going down yesterday while they limped to a weak win over the Bengals. Now they have New England and San Diego in the next two weeks. As banged up as they are, I can’t expect wins in either of those games. If they can get healthy for December, I still think they’re a playoff team. But they’re clearly a notch below the Pats, Steelers, Ravens, and Bolts right now. Unless something crazy happens, it’s looking like a Wild Card weekend season-end for the Colts.
• First stomach virus of the year hit the house over the weekend. Somehow we managed to have only one sick kid, although I’m fearful of getting a call from either M’s or C’s school today with news it has hit them. It’s always fun to get puked on. L. doused me pretty good Friday afternoon.
• Last week was a big transition week for me, professionally. The previous Friday (Nov. 5) I covered a football sectional final game. It snowed that night. The following Tuesday, I covered a girls basketball season-opener. It was 70 that day. Weird. We still have one team left in the football playoffs – this week is semi-state – but I won’t get that game. So my football season is over with ten games covered this year. It was a lot of fun, but I am ready for basketball.
• KU plays Valpo tonight in college hoops. I remember, before I moved to Indiana, I thought Homer Drew was a great guy. But when I moved here, it seemed like no one in the state liked him that much. I’ve heard some stories, I’ll leave it at that. Then his son Scott took the Baylor job and became the most hated coach in the Big 12 with his Eddie Haskell act. I hope we kick Valpo’s ass.
• Some ideas that are percolating that I hope to get to at some point, between kid duty and cranking out the NaNoWriMo words:
• Athletes on Twitter
• Turner Gill (This one has been brewing for awhile, and has changed from week-to-week. I think it’ll become a post-season post, now.)
• Why I wish I was filthy rich. It’s not what you think.
• A review of a new piece of hardware I’ve added to my collection.
• Some other stuff.

And that’s that. Happy Monday.

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I’ve had a draft sitting around for awhile that I was unsure whether to post or not. In fact, I think I have three different versions of it sitting on my hard drive.

The New York Time’s Nicholas Kristof had a terrific story in last weekend’s Magazine about international philanthropy. Kristof was one of the people who worked hard to raise awareness of the Darfur genocide and continues to write about similar issues.

His latest piece struck a nerve, as it shows how people who want to make a difference can, if they just make the effort to get involved. Even if you don’t read the rest of my post, I recommend reading his article and thinking about where and how you can help others.

I have a dumb problem. For a couple years I’ve been trying to come up with a cause of some kind to support. I make a few donations a year, either to friends who are raising money for something or by adding some extra onto any runs I take part in. Each Christmas our family adopts a family in need and helps to make their holiday a little better. But I don’t have a cause that I’m committed to, something that I take great interest in, apply my time to, and believe I’m making a difference through.

I feel incredibly fortunate for the life I live. Our family is well-fed, clothed, and safely housed. Our kids are going to private schools. I am able to work in a low-paying job because I enjoy it, not because I have to. It feels like I should be doing something to help others.

But I’ve never adopted a cause because I can’t figure out which direction to go.

Should I get involved with something like Kiva, where I can make small loans to individuals around the world? Each month I could take a little of what I make and directly impact someone else’s life.

Or should I raise money for more broadly based development projects in third world countries, such as the various projects that aim to bring clean water to Africans?

Should I find something like the Darfur genocide groups that I got involved in during grad school and become a true activist rather than simply a donator? I could adopt a cause, blog about it, raise awareness, and create political pressure.

I tend to think globally, since I’ve always been most interested in world affairs. But what about domestic/local groups? Is it better to spend time helping the homeless of Indiana, sick kids at a local hospital, or funding a local center for cancer patients?

Or is it best to spread my time, money, and interest around, supporting a variety of causes over the course of the year as I learn about them?

I think about this a lot, but never come to a decision. Instead, I’m stuck in a strange paralysis where I do nothing. Well, nothing other than writing the checks to friends who are getting up early on a weekend for a cause.

One of my goals for the rest of the year is to break this paralysis and finally do something. I don’t know if I’ll adopt a single cause, or a handful. But I want to finally get to the end of a year with the satisfaction of knowing that I made an effort to share my good fortune with others.

I have some ideas. As I get deeper into this process, I’ll share how I’m progressing here. If you’re down for a cause, feel free to send me a pitch and perhaps you can get me on your team.
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Let’s cross some more T’s and dot some more I’s. Or whatever. In other words, clearing out some of the junk in my head.

High school football playoffs start tonight in Indiana. I’m assigned to what I expect to be a big blowout, with my team on the short end. Several of our teams have tough games in the first round, so there’s a decent chance this will be my last week covering football. Girls basketball starts in three weeks, so things will pick up again soon.

This week’s Modern Family was hilarious. Most of them are, but something about this week’s was especially great. In many ways, it wasn’t the typical episode where everything is wrapped up by the end. But there were a lot of moments of absurdity that the show does incredibly well. Gloria’s car alarm yelling. Cameron’s impromptu Cherokee. The bar of soap phone. Good stuff.

That said, Community has been right there with Modern Family every week so far this season.¹ Shame Parks & Rec isn’t around to add to the fun. It’s a contest where the audience is the big winner.

The wife and I signed up to run the Indianapolis Mini Marathon next May. It’s been a goal of mine since we moved here, and I even signed up once but never got around to training and sold my number to a friend. There’s no room for excuses anymore! It’s go time! What better way to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of running 26.2 than by doing 13.1?

I’ve barely watched the baseball playoffs this year. I’m pleased the Yankees are on the verge of defeat, but refuse to count them out yet. More difficult to believe is that the Phillies are in the same predicament. It sure seemed like the Phillies getting through the NL playoffs unscathed was the easiest bet of the postseason.

The Colts bye week is traditionally a quiet week in Indy. That’s not the case this week. Joseph Addai got banged up in Washington and his prognosis is uncertain. Austin Collie just had hand surgery and is expected to miss several weeks. And now word has broken that Dallas Clark is seeing a hand specialist. Some reports say he could miss the rest of the season. That does not bode well for the second half of the season. If the Colts manage to get to 10 or 11 wins this year, it might be the finest effort of the Manning-era.

We’ve been super lucky health-wise this fall. Last year we were constantly sick from the second week of school to nearly Thanksgiving. C. and L. got smacked by colds this week, and we had an enjoyable L. puking on the floor incident this morning. Kids are awesome.

Happy weekend to you.

During my summer blog redesign project, I added a number of design websites – both general design and web-specific – to my daily reading list. Through them, I’ve learned more about what I’ll call the Cult of Minimalism.¹ Minimalist web design puts an emphasis on strong, simple design elements that easily convey a site’s message to the reader. That means fewer widgets and graphic embellishments in favor of a sparse, but carefully designed, look.

That aesthetic has been my goal in my blog redesign. The interesting aspect of Minimalism is that it takes as much effort to make something simple and beautiful, while avoiding being boring, as it does to pile on element after element.

The Cult is about far more than design, though. Many people live their lives according to minimalist principles. They pare down their possessions to only what they need each day and carefully consider each purchase before adding something.

The two articles below highlight this minimalist take on what we own. While I think the hyper-minimalists go a bit far in their efforts, two things about their lifestyle appeal to me. Their embrace of digital living, for starters.

One of the things I love most about computers is how powerful they have become in our lifetimes. Today a computer isn’t about just creating spreadsheets and business letters or playing games. They’ve become our primary communications devices and where we store much of our lives, making data that was once stationary endlessly portable. Not everything can be digitized, but the idea of having as much of your life as possible on a few hard drives and always having it handy appeals to me. We all kind of do that, but to go all in and not have a desk full of papers, bookshelves full of reading material, and photo albums or CDs lying around has a certain allure to me.

Second, reducing your possessions and thinking more about your purchases is something we can all do better at. I find it’s way too easy to click the Purchase button on a website, or throw in an extra item or two at Costco or Target without really thinking about whether I need them or not. The digital age has made it easier to replace Need with Want when we are shopping, whether online or in person. Each time I clean out my office closet or the attic or go through my clothes at the end of a season, I think that I should be wiser about replacing the times that I’m throwing out or giving away. And yet I keep buying shit. A lot of shit.

I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation – cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact,” said Mr Sutton.

Another unintended philosophical nugget of the project was to understand that many things are worth less monetarily than you think. Some of your possessions might even have a negative value.

The final article explores the opposite extreme: never getting rid of anything. These stories – the ones about people with homes that are literally full of junk – always fascinate me. It’s one thing to have all of your storage spaces crammed full of stuff. It’s another to let it take over your living space completely. These people always feel like they should be at the center of a mystery novel, because they clearly have some interesting stories to tell.

“It’s little by little,” he said, stumbling to explain his compulsion. “If I don’t need it now, I’m going to need it later.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson the last few days.* I’ll have some thoughts on the self-proclaimed King of Pop eventually, I promise. That third kid really is affecting my blogging, no?

(Yeah, yeah, Farrah died too. And Billy Mays and Ed McMahon for that matter. I was about two years too young to really get the Farrah thing back in her prime. I remember a neighbor who was a couple years older being very proud of his Farrah poster and me thinking, “She’s pretty and all, but what’s the big deal?” I figured it out a few years later. So very sad that she died, but in a way it was a relief. I saw the two minute, Nightly News version of her recent NBC special that showed her going through cancer treatments and thought, “No way am I watching that show tonight.” Sometimes death is a blessing. I’m not sure what happens to us when we die, but I hope that she is in a better place and feeling no pain if we end up somewhere else.)

Anyway, here’s another story about the curiosity that is the social networking side of the web. Back in grad school I wrote an article for the campus paper about a series of nature walks that took place near campus. As a good reporter, I took part in one of the walks. It was a little new-agey for me and I’m pretty sure the person that lead the walk had some mental issues. This person literally hugged a tree on our walk. I pulled the “I’m a grad student” card and wrote a first person account of the walk, since I had no idea how to crank out a newsy story about this walk.

So that was a couple years ago. Periodically, the person that lead the walk has popped up in the areas of the Internets I spend time in. I forget if they requested to be friends on Facebook, but I do know I got a Linked In request from them.

I have a Twitter account that I use to follow people, but I never post anything to it. It’s hard enough keeping the blog updated and adding something to Facebook on occasion.

This weekend I got a message that the nature walk person was following me on Twitter. Two years after I interviewed them. Who does that? It’s getting a little creepy. If I get a phone call I’m going to freak out, I think.