I love NPR

Have I ever told you how much I love listening to NPR on the way to work? Every monday morning they run a commentary titled "This I believe" where normal everyday folks write in an essay commenting on what they believe in in life. I heard a really good one this morning about being happy with your life. It made me think not only about my life, but about other people who are unhappy in their own, so I thought I would share it here. By the way, it's from the lead singer of the band "The Flaming Lips". It goes like this:

Creating Our Own Happiness

I was sitting in my car at a stoplight intersection listening to the radio. I was, I guess, lost in the moment, thinking how happy I was to be inside my nice warm car. It was cold and windy outside, and I thought, ''Life is good.''

Now this was a long light. As I waited, I noticed two people huddled together at the bus stop. To my eyes, they looked uncomfortable; they looked cold and they looked poor. Their coats looked like they came from a thrift store. They weren’t wearing stuff from The Gap. I knew it because I’d been there.

This couple seemed to be doing their best to keep warm. They were huddled together and I thought to myself, “Oh, those poor people in that punishing wind.”

But then I saw their faces. Yes, they were huddling, but they were also laughing. They looked to be sharing a good joke, and, suddenly, instead of pitying them, I envied them. I thought, “Huh, what’s so funny?” They didn’t seem to notice the wind. They weren’t worried about their clothes. They weren’t looking at my car thinking, “I wish I had that.”

You know how a single moment can feel like an hour? Well, in that moment, I realized I had assumed this couple needed my pity, but they didn’t. I assumed things were all bad for them, but they weren’t and I understood we all have the power to make moments of happiness happen.

Now maybe that’s easy for me to say. I feel lucky to have fans around the world, a house with a roof, and a wife who puts up with me. But I must say I felt this way even when I was working at Long John Silver’s. I worked there for 11 years as a fry cook. When you work at a place that long, you see teenagers coming in on their first dates; then they’re married; then they’re bringing in their kids. You witness whole sections of people’s lives.

In the beginning it seemed like a dead-end job. But at least I had a job. And frankly, it was easy. After 2 weeks, I knew all I needed to know, and it freed my mind. The job allowed me to dream about what my life could become. The first year I worked there, we got robbed. I lay on the floor; I thought I was going to die. I didn’t think I stood a chance. But everything turned out alright. A lot of people look at life as a series of miserable tasks but after that, I didn’t.

I believe this is something all of us can do: try to be happy within the context of the life we’re actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for, or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves. This I believe.

For more good stuff: This I believe.

C

We found a house we like

So now what? We found a house we like. I don't know what to do now. This is a big deal, so I don't know what to do. It's on the higher end of our price range and I'm pretty sure we can swing it...I guess I'm just waiting for a sign from God to say "buy it" or "wait one month for something else".

I think I just get too excited too fast about stuff like this. Good thing my wife is "Two-Rivers-ey" (i.e. muley) when it comes to this stuff...so we make a good couple!

C

I don't know what to do

I got out of work today at 5:15pm, and I'm having trouble figuring out what to do with the rest of my day. I'm not used to this free time. The wife is off playing with her ex-coworkers from The 'Nati, hence my suffering. The cats aren't any help either because they just sleep and that's not entertaining me.

I was hoping to use the bbq tonight to make my dinner, but there is still too much snow on our back porch to move the grill away from the building. Some previous tenant here didn't do that and melted some of the siding. I hope we don't get blamed for that.

This house issue...still set to meet with the realtor on saturday and sunday. Two days of visiting houses. That reminds me, I need to print off some house checklists. I made up this worksheet in excel to record specific characteristics of the houses we visit. I also made up another worksheet where I enter in the cost of the house, our downpayment amount, the yearly taxes and it computes the monthly cost of the house. Hugs and I were looking at houses online last week and I was making some minor modifications to it and she was about to blow a gasket. I couldn't believe that my wife doesn't have the ability to appreciate my ability to manipulate data in excel to aid in our house hunting adventure. I am so unappreciated in my time. She literally told me she was going to lose it if she had to watch me format one more cell. Geez! Her eyes almost rolled out of her head because she was so annoyed with me.

That's alright we made it through.

C

Lent

Since Lent starts today, I'm going to try something new to improve myself as a person. I'm going to attempt to give something up, but I'm not sure how well I will do. So what am I going to give up? Ready for this? I'm going to try and give up talking about people behind their backs. Not that I'm a non-stop gossip spouter, but you know, there are always those little comments made at work about others, at home and out with friends that don't reflect nicely on the person(s) the comments are about. The wife says that's a good one, so I'll stick with it. We'll see how this goes...so far today I've caught myself and stopped. There is hope for all of us!

And in case you missed it, today was Ash Wednesday. It's supposed to be a day of fasting. I've never been good at fasting, but I tried to improve on that this year as well. It went okay, better than I thought, but there is one thing I noticed today (maybe this is just me) , but fluids just shot through me. I don't understand the physiology or the biology behind it, but it happened.

Anyhow, the wife is waiting to do work on the computer...

C

vacation is planned

We've got our vacation planned finally. Charleston, SC or bust!

Charleston?? No Cancun, no South Beach, no cruise???

Planning this vacation was very frustrating, to say the least. She wanted to go here, I wanted to go there. Then when we agreed on where to go, we couldn't afford the plane tickets, hotel and rental car. Then we figured that we'd like to eat as well, and that blew our budget.

The difficulty with this vacation is that Hugs's vacation is during the official "Spring Break" time, so all the prices are jacked up to double the off season rates (think twice before marrying a teacher!!). Not only that, if we go to someplace sunny and warm there are going to be oodles of drunk college kids...not something that'll make for a relaxing adult vacation.

So do we go to a big city? Well, neither of us are big city folks. Museums and art galleries are so so....so what else do you do in a big city? We'd rather spend time in a national park hiking on a trail. And we aren't too big into clubbin' either, so now what?

Regardless, it'll be great. I'll spend a week with my wife and not have to worry about work or anything else.

C

old bag of nails

Hugs's pal Sarah B came to town last night. We had a good time and went out to the 'Old Bag of Nails Pub'. It's a pretty good little place. It's the first time that I didn't even look at the menu when I ordered. Why? Because all I had on my mind was fish and chips. You get this huge hunk of fish which is about 12" long and another little hunk. Oooh it was good. I guess I'm getting warmed up for the friday night fish fry's of Lent.

Speaking of which, I should do something for Lent, but I can't think of what. Hmmmm. Have to think on it.

I went and gave blood yesterday and it took quite a while. I had a bunch of not-so-hearty folks in front of me. I girl got weak and collapsed (she became so white!), another had to stay on the bed until she felt better and yet another had to have an icepack applied to her stick point. I guess I was due for a long visit. But that's okay because I had no other plans until 5:30 mass, so I enjoyed the wait and watched some college basketball.

One thing that I don't get about this place is after you go somewhere a donate blood, the donation center will typically have chips, cracker and cookies to eat along with juices. Well, this place has the snacks, but only coffee and ice water. It boggles my mind that they would have coffee there. Why wouldn't they have a sign up that says "donors don't drink the coffee after a donation". Duh, it's just going to make you lose fluids.

Friday night we spent looking at houses online. We found about 6-8 that we liked and are going to visit next weekend. Whoo-hoo! We were looking at condos too, thinking that they might be cheaper, but they aren't. Once you figure in the mortgage payment, house insurance and the condo fee, the price is through the roof! At least for our budget. So condos had a short lifespan in our search criteria.

So anyway...

C

had some fun in the snow

So I got sent home from work the other day because of the snow. It was a level 2 snow advisory outside, meaning people should only be out on the road if they have to. So what did I do? Left work, went to meijer, bought some sleds, picked up the wife and went to the metropark and went sledding. We had a blast!

Check this out:


I wasn't aiming for her, honest! I put my arm out to catch her because I thought she was going to fall on me. Turns out, it was my bosses (you can hear him in the background) daughters soccer coach. Oops. That's okay, he thought it was funny.

Here's one of the wife:


My butt is still bruised. I think by the weekend it'll be fully healed.

Getting close to noon, have to go to work!

C

dinner for two

Tonight our chef prepared a lovely dinner of chili and a steamed vegetable medley for two.



The food looked so pretty I had to take a picture of it.

I'm supposed to be trying to plan our vacation, but all I'm accomplishing is catching up on a week's worth of blogging!

C

So Valentine's day is coming, got any good gift ideas? I had a good idea to get Hugs a ring with our birthstones in it. Basically, something with her stone in the middle with smaller ones of mine surrounding it, showing that she is the center of my life. Blah blah blah, mushy mushy mushy, blah, crap, blah.

So since Valentine's day snuck up on me, again (like the day changes year to year or something, duh), so I decided to reveal my plan to Hugs for 2 reasons:
1. I'm a bad husband and didn't realize how close it was and
2. figured that if we went shopping for it together I'd be sure to get something she would like.

I also introduced this idea with a bouquet of flowers. I think I could pull off anything with her as long as I broke the news with flowers.

So we went out shopping and found some crap that we didn't like and was way too expensive. Hugs suggested looking on the internet, saying that she's found some stuff online about designing your own jewelry. Hi ho, hi ho, off to Google I go. You wouldn't believe where we found a ring that we both liked! Wal-mart! I couldn't believe it. I never thought I would be shopping for a ring online at Wal-mart, but stranger things have happened. So we'll probably go to the store next weekend and verify sizes and make sure it looks as good in real life as it does online.

And that is that.

C

Have you ever noticed how people have more "courage" when you don't speak face to face? Ever send a nasty-gram email or get lippy with a customer service representative because you feel more powerful when you don't have to look them in the eye? I guess I just finally realized how easily that happens in life because last week I was on the receiving end of a big ego over the telephone. Upon this realization I found it difficult to not break out in hysterical laughter listening to this person rant. He sounded so foolish. The blasphemy made it that much more hysterical.

So then I gave it a little more thought and realized I do the same thing too (at times). I've gotten lippy with the Sear's people over their inability to send our bill to the correct address; raised my voice at previous property managers over no heat, dripping radiators and no hot water (all the same apartment). So I'm just as guilty as the next guy. But I'm just curious if anybody else has realized this or done this themselves?

Coincidentally, I was thinking of some choice words to tell to our current property management over this past week over our frozen pipes. Last monday school was canceled for Hugs, and I not having to go into work until noon, didn't realize our shower pipes were frozen until 10am or so. Very disappointing. I've lived in colder parts of Ohio in cruddier apartments and have never had this happen. They brought a little heater over and directed the warm air through the access panel in our spare bedroom onto the pipes and eventually they thawed.

However, this frozen pipe issue reared it's ugly head again on friday night. Friday night at 10pmI was doing the dishes (as I'm sure all married couples are in their pj's by now doing similar activities) and was greeted with a stopped up sink. Chaos and flooding of the cabinet under the sink ensued. So we cleaned up and I called and left a nasty message on their machine. I'm not sure if I would have the stones to be so direct, rude and forceful eye to eye as I was over the phone. It didn't get me anywhere, because by noon saturday morning they had yet to call back. After a few phone calls were placed, we had the pleasure of a loaner electric heater which we placed under our sink facing the pipes. Around 4pm today they finally opened up.

Based on our recent adventures as tenants, we were very excited to meet with a real estate agent saturday night (yea, friday night I was doing the dishes and saturday night we met with a real estate agent. I like my metamucil shaken not stirred.) She came recommended to us so we initially trusted her. She continued to gain our trust because she didn't come across like a shark. I think we may end up sticking with her to act as our realator, we liked her. So we are back in the hunt again.

Okay, more to post on other topics....

C

So I got a haircut last week. Everybody at work was totally shocked. People didn't recognize me. It was nice having hair like Heath Ledger up until Brokeback Mountain came out. Now I look like....we won't mention it. But, now you can see that I have ears and a neck.

I'm still working that shifted shift next week too. It's a bummer, because the only reason I saw my wife last week was because she had monday through wednesday off of school because of the cold and snow. So this week our only interaction with one another will be as I get into bed sometime between midnight and 2am and as she leaves for school at 7am. Bummer. But on the bright side, it's great for me because I get more done at work because I'm not bothered by other people. It also forces me to think on my own, forcing me to be more independent, but in turn makes me a better engineer.

I also received a nice complement on my training that I gave last week out in Palo Alto, CA. One of the engineering managers who is in charge of busting our chops and making sure we have all our i's dotted and t's crossed on the product they are buying from us said that the training that we gave was "good". I showed this to one of my bosses and he said that the complement that we received was as good of a complement as we were ever going to receive out of him. So that's was nice to hear. Whoo hooo!

I haven't blogged in a while, so I'm going to break this up into a couple of small ones.

C

I'm going to migrate my old blog here. Everyone else has it, so I'm following suit.

Trying to pre-qualify for a home loan online. 1 down, how many more should I do?

Oh, and our shower doesn't work. I left an irritated message on the answering service at the rental office. I just pulled the knob and nothing happened. I swear, in all my renting I've never had to call the rental office more than I've had to here. I don't think we'll have too much lack of motivation to look for a home if stuff like this keeps happening. Although, we should be nice to them in the event we want out of our lease early if we find the right house and have to jump on it.

Oh, and this week my shift is shifted by 4 hours. I'm going in at noon instead of 8. That way there is less fighting for time on the system to run tests.

C