Here it is, Hump Day. Rained all night last night into this morning. Gia crawled into bed with us at some point. We woke up and she was standing outside the half-closed bedroom door, so we told her she could come in. She was half asleep. Silently, she came in, crawled up next to me and went to sleep. It wasn’t too hot, but it was kind of sticky, which didn’t make for a restful night of sleep for us. This all bled into a hellish commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic pretty much the whole way.

It’ll be a short week at least. Family coming in over the Fourth of July. I’m looking forward to a nice, long, extended weekend with lots of laughing, great food, and, of course, the wine. I’ll be raiding Fairway tomorrow for sure.

I’m feeling like I haven’t spent enough time with Gia in particular. She had a rough one last night, which is probably why she got lonely. I usually spend more time with her when I get home, before putting her to bed. I realize she needs not to be overly dependent on this routine, but it’s difficult to pull myself away. I miss her, and the more she develops her communication skills, the worse it’s getting. I can hear my friend at work laughing at me right now. I’m just a big sucker.

Just brought some food back from the sneaky Mexican joint. She said the Enchiladas do not come with sour cream or guacamole. Sure enough, after already eating a few bites, I discovered some sour cream on those suckers. I hate sour cream. So much for my lunch. I’ll be taking the rest home.

This is kind of a home stretch. Nikki and I are planning on embarking on some dietary adjustments some time after our long weekend. I’m not sure what these adjustments are going to look like yet, but they’ll be healthy adjustments, whatever they are. I heard Jack LaLanne on the Jay Thomas Show this morning. He called in with his wife. He’s 91, and he sounds great. He’s selling some “Power Juicer” which looks kind of cool (there’s a picture of it on Amazon). We already have a juicer, but with this one, supposedly you can juice the entire fruit rather than having to cut it up. Sounds pretty convenient. Mixed reviews for it, though. Anyway, I hope to make it to 91, and I hope to sound as good as he does. I have a ways to go. I’m sure he can kick my ass right now. It’s time to turn that around. No time like the present. I’m about to turn 40 in less than two months. I’m feeling pretty good these days. Something about having children feels like it’s revitalizing me. Maybe it’s being forced to look at things from a child’s perspective, something I really haven’t done in a few decades, or maybe it’s the push-ups (or “fuff-upps”) Gia forces me to do with her. She’s getting to be quite the tyrant. She makes a great laughing barbell.

I’m realizing this last string of posts is starting to resemble Ricardo Semler’s “The Seven Day Weekend,” if only for their titles. I can’t speak for the content, since I still haven’t gotten past the second (or third?) chapter. There needs to be some better time management taking place in my life so I can actually do the things I’ve resolved to do, one of which is reading that book. If only I could absorb the material through osmosis. If I could, I’d be a much more knowledgeable person right now, since I’ve got what I believe to be a fairly diverse book collection. I don’t have a ton of books, but I think what I have are good books. Of course, I can’t say for sure. I’m going on the reviews that I’ve read for the most part, since this last book is just one of a series of books I’ve resolved to read but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

So we were having a conversation last night while cooking. We’re about forty minutes or so into boiling a pot of water when it dawned on me why the water was refusing to come to a full boil. We have a propane (or LP, or whatever it’s called) stove. We ran out of propane three months ago, once again in the middle of cooking. Looks like we’ll be filling that puppy every three months, not every year like the single woman who lived in our house before us claimed she filled it. I gather she didn’t do much cooking. In fact, having lived in this house for eight months, we’re really trying to figure out what exactly she did do. She certainly didn’t clean the windows (well, not REALLY clean them), and it’s pretty apparent that she didn’t have much of a problem with her cat pissing all over the place, particularly in what’s now my home office. Incense helps.

The house was in good shape when we moved in. I complimented the seller at closing about the condition of the place, and she said it was really clean when she moved in. The translation of this is that she bought a house, lived in it for roughly two years, did absolutely nothing during this time, then sold it for about a sixty grand profit. Now that the real estate market seems to be correcting itself, we probably won’t be seeing much more of this type of thing. I can’t help but feel a little annoyed, sort of like I paid some woman a $30,000 a year salary for taking up space for the last two years. The least she could have done was clean the cat piss.

We’ve been talking about starting a reality show, “Reality Real Estate” or something like that. We’d basically be doing the real estate thing, except we’d say what we really feel about how these people are living. So when we walk into the overpriced place with a pile of garbage in the living room blocking the fireplace, we may refrain from belittling the homeowners directly, but we’ll have plenty to say as we drive away. Considering the state of things these days, there should be no shortage of material. The upside of the show could be those real gems being sold by people who actually take pride in themselves and their property. Maybe each show could end with a successful sale of one of those, to buyers who really appreciate what they’re getting, a genuine win-win situation all around. Despite all the horror stories, these deals can and do happen occasionally. I know, because our own deal went smoothly. Sure, eight months down the road, we’ve got a few gripes, but it’s really not so bad. The gripes are minor at best. The other side of the show could be highlighting other agents and their full range of colorful personalities. With 26,000 or so agents on Long Island alone, that could be a whole show in itself.

Ahh, Monday, in all its glory. Relaxing over the weekend is exhausting. I’m in a fog; my brain is simply not functioning, mainly because I’m not overly motivated to get it in gear. I’m becoming increasingly resentful of my daily grind: commuting 40 miles each way, every day, sitting in traffic, whatever. I’ve decided on becoming independently wealthy. Apparently, it’s been done before by many other people. I don’t think I’m particularly unworthy of this. It’s time. I’m watching my daughters grow up before my eyes, and I’m spending precious little time with them, sharing in their experience. It’s just not right. Gia can say “I miss you” now. Every day she gets more and more capable of tearing my heart out of my chest. She’s an expert at that. Ava’s got some skills in that area as well. I’m doomed. I’ve surrendered. They own me. The only upside of this daily grind is the coming home part. Gia has her little routine, when I pull up, she leans out the front door and screams, “Daddy’s home!!” It’s just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen or heard. She’ll look up at me and ask, “Home?” I’ll say, “I’m home!” That makes her smile and get all mushy. On the one hand, it’s adorable, but on the other, it kills me, because it implies that I’m not home a lot of the time. I just read some of this guy’s blog. I even threw a comment up there. He has a book, which I’m considering purchasing, but I think I should finish the other two books I’ve been trying to read: The Seven Day Weekend and The Art of the Start. There’s definitely an ongoing theme here: entrepreneurship. Am I an entrepreneur? I’d like to believe I am. I’m certainly reading up a whole lot on the subject. I’m determined to generate additional sources of income, preferably many of them, or at least a few really solid ones, as long as they’re directly linked to things I enjoy. If I could pull this off, now that would be a legacy I’d be happy to leave to my family. I can’t bear the thought of them being subjected to a typically cubicle-laden existence. Having their creativity stifled is not a fate I can allow.

Ava is rolling around on the floor. Right now, she’s by the entertainment center, next to her big stuffed chicken. She’s just started crawling. Nikki and Gia are out getting bagels and Starbuck’s. They don’t get to spend much exclusive time together, so we take the opportunity when it presents itself. Weekends are too short. That’s my stock answer when someone asks me how my weekend was. I just say, “Too short.” I started reading The Seven Day Weekend. If I wasn’t writing right now, I’d probably be reading that. I’m only a chapter or two into it, but I agree with this guy’s point completely. The old tradition of the five day work week is history. There are people working around the clock always. We’re always working, or doing something. Why even call it work? We should be striving to enjoy ourselves every moment. There’s plenty of crap which is bound to happen in our lives. We need to spend our valuable time, that time when there’s not crap hitting us in the face, enjoying that time. That includes the time we spend at “work.” People need to wake up and realize that work is just a word. Sure, we need to support ourselves and our families, but there really is no law that states that we have to be miserable while doing it. I don’t know where this trap got set for everyone, but it’s there, and I see it daily. People running around like mice in a maze. Their weekends are too short always. I’m striving to make my weekend just the right length. The five day work week is an antiquated notion. It’s an unnatural way of looking at the world. People are simply not built to conform to such boundaries. We need flexibility. Give us some freedom and we’ll do great things. Restrict us and all hell breaks loose. It’s everywhere, just look at the signs. I won’t get into politics, but it’s obvious that restriction is evil, and it begets evil. People get killed. Innocent people suffer. Our children deserve better.

I’ve been motivated of late to clean up my workspace at my office. Unfortunately, since I do not work from home, there are more limitations to what I can do to improve my surroundings, but doing something is better than doing nothing. I have found that I can be much more productive and much less stressed out if I’m not surrounded by clutter. This morning, I read this article, and I was inspired to continue along this path of cleanliness and super-organization.

I realized that one of my drawers, the top drawer of the smaller cabinet next to me, had become increasingly annoying. This is the drawer where I put my stamps, but I also tend to throw condiments in there, you know, the extra Chinese mustards and soy sauces, salt and pepper packets, some Sugar in the Raw packets, etc. Twenty minutes into throwing away condiment packets, I realized I had never cleaned this drawer out. I’ve been here for six years. That’s a whole lot of condiments. Apparently, saving condiments is not as useful a practice as I once thought it was. It’s staggering to think how much of that crap in particular gets wasted.

Stuffed in the back of this drawer were remnants of whomever worked here before me. Among these remnants were four rubber stamps (I like the IMPORTANT stamp, personally) and a pack of Avery Reinforcements, the kind we used to use back in grade school to secure our looseleaf pages. I thumbtacked the pack of reinforcements to a wall next to me, and left the stamps on someone’s desk. I’d e-mailed her a link to that article earlier. She’s surrounded constantly by clutter, and I think she’s never actually closed an e-mail she’s received (she uses Eudora, a miserable e-mail client that doesn’t appear to have any kind of limitation on how many e-mails are opened at one time, and it also seems to remember exactly what you had opened before you shut your computer down). She’s been here a lot longer than me. I’m hoping I can look forward to the museum that evolves if and when she decides to relaxify.

The title of this post is based on Lifehacks, a nifty website with a catchy name, dealing with all sorts of productivity tips. I figured I’d jot down some things which have improved my own life and, in some cases, the lives of those around me, with some explanations included.

del.icio.us: This website has certainly become popular enough with the technology-savvy crowd, but most of the people I deal with on a daily basis don’t belong to that bunch. That’s unfortunate, though I suspect popularity will increase and begin to catch on with the general public, provided it doesn’t get contaminated with a whole lot of garbage. One friend of mine described it as Google on steroids, which isn’t far from the truth. I’ve been using it to store my bookmarks in a shared area online. My wife tends to check it now and then, so I lean towards posting things that might interest her. It’s also a powerful search engine, which searches through sites that have been recommended by the community, hence the Google analogy. Rather than relying on Google’s algorithms, real people choose real sites that get added to the repository. So, after searching high and low for a perch for our parrot, I finally gave del.icio.us a shot. In a couple of clicks, I found Perch Factory, which was exactly the type of place I’d been looking for. Our bird is much happier now that she can hang out with all of us wherever we might be on her Companion Perch Portable Tee Stand, rather than be confined to her cage in my home office all the time.

Zillow.com: If you have any interest in the subject of real estate, check this website out. You can get a Comparative Market Analysis of your home in seconds, and it’s even fairly accurate in my opinion. (I am, incidentally, a NYS Licensed Real Estate Agent.)

VBA Developer’s Handbook: I’m not affiliated in any way with the writers of this book, and I’m not even necessarily trying to push the book itself. Rather, it’s VBA itself which has dramatically improved my life over the years. Considering how many people use Microsoft Office all day long, it pains me how few even know what VBA is. Whenever I encounter a task which I’m liable to repeat, I look for ways of automating it with VBA. Having done this for many years now, I can say with some degree of confidence that I’m doing the work of ten people at any given time while at work (probably a conservative estimate)- at least, ten people who don’t know what VBA is yet depend on Microsoft Office to do their jobs.

Sirius Satellite Radio: Since moving into our house out in the boondocks, my one-way work commute has increased from 12 miles to over 40 miles. Shortly after said move, Howard Stern made his historic move to Sirius. He was to be replaced with David Lee Roth, whom I admire tremendously, having been a die-hard Van Halen fan from the pre-Van Hagar days (I’m sorry, but Van Hagar was NOT Van Halen, no matter what you say). This combination of events spelled one thing for me: Sirius. In all fairness, I gave ol’ Dave a shot that first morning, driving my sorry ass to work, listening to him grill his old gravelly-voiced uncle whoever about who knows or cares, and that sealed the deal. I was at Best Buy right after work. By that night, I was hooked up with a full one year subscription. My commute turned from a stressfull daily ordeal to a relaxing, humor-filled experience that I look forward to. There’s even the huge added bonuses of Scott Ferrall and Bubba the Love Sponge, not to mention Raw Dog. As of this past Monday, they began streaming all these shows over the Internet. Between all that and Howard Stern On Demand, my life has become richer. My commute is now an ongoing First Amendment political statement. I can spend more quality time with my family, since I’ve been laughing the whole way home, rather than dealing with 40 miles of road rage. The subscription has paid for itself many times over.

Ta-da List: They say “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but really I think laziness is the proud parent. It occurred to me one evening as my wife was dictating yet another shopping list to me over the phone that there must be a better way. Sure enough, there’s this free online list sharing service. No more paper (except for when I print the list out prior to actually shopping). She can add items as they occur to her, I can add things I need, and life is good. I also recently discovered Wridea, which is a similar concept, with some cool features which set it apart from Ta-da List, such as categories and a “Print View” option, but I haven’t gotten too deeply into it. Ta-da has been working just fine.

Fairway: We like to cook, and we really enjoy gourmet, preferably organic foods. They opened one of these markets a mile from my job. Try their freshly sliced, organic smoked salmon. With all the bagels and lox I consumed growing up, nothing could have prepared me for this stuff. Now I could never go back to prepackaged lox. They also have the best meat, seafood and deli departments I’ve ever seen (which include plenty of organic items to choose from, of course), and I’ve seen more than a few. Try their organic Peruvian coffee. Surprisingly, they’re not great with the fresh mozzarella- though they do carry mozzarella curds, which I hear is the way to go if you’re up for the added steps of making your own mozzarella. Supposedly, it’s pretty easy, but I haven’t tried, yet. There’s also bulk olives, sundried tomatoes, organic spring mix… I could go on and on. The place is overwhelming, and we’ve struck gold.

Bonterra: Speaking of organic, we’ve tried a bunch of different organic wines, and maybe it’s the lack of sulfites in most of them that we’re just not used to, but frankly, the vast majority really suck. These people, on the other hand, aren’t quite as sulfite-phobic as the average hippie. They’re probably not even hippies. Their wine has sulfites, it’s organic- and, in my humble, non-connoisseur’s opinion, it’s great. Thank my wife for turning me on to it.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ll probably be posting a lot more in more specialized areas. There is, for instance, the Bumbo Seat, which deserves mentioning here as well as under the Parenting category. From their website: “The Bumbo is a soft, safe and comfortable environment for your baby. This innovative infant chair is designed to fit the contour of your baby’s body while supporting their spine and encouraging good posture. It lets babies sit upright all by themselves as soon as they have head control. The Bumbo Seat provides the trunk control. This helps your child learn the skills they need to sit up on their own.” There’s also Wikipedia, an endless source of information, The Internet Move Database (IMDb)…

I used to write a lot. It was a great way to avoid paying attention in the majority of my high school and college classes. Ironically, some of my writing got published in the monthly Physics Department publication of my alma mater, of all places. They mainly published a couple of my comic strips, samples of which can be found here.

I’ve always loved writing, though it has been a painfully long time since I’ve been able to devote much time to it. So, recently, I decided it was time to write my novel.

Five or six chapters in, I realized I was churning out an autobiography. It was good to get a lot of this stuff out, but I’m not nearly presumptuous enough to think anyone else would care to read it. One chapter, if you can even call it that, is now a blog entry.

I am now a little less ambitious in the novel department. With all the writing I’ve done in my life, I never had the attention span to write anything lengthier than a short story or series of comic strips. For the moment, blog entries will do fine, and thanks to this guy, I’ve got a little more inspiration to do exactly that, particularly from this post.

Whether or not anyone besides me or my close family reads any of it, maybe it will bring me a little closer to that enlightened place, wherever that might be…

I was born and raised Jewish. For the most part, that meant bagels and lox with the family on Sunday and living in a middle class neighborhood in Queens, New York. A fair percentage of my parents’ friends who lived in the vicinity were Jewish, and there was some tradition involved in sending your kids to Sunday School, which was about the last thing I ever wanted to do on a Sunday morning.
Three years of Sunday School led to three more years of Sunday School along with three years of Hebrew School. There was a Bar Mitzvah at age 13 in there somewhere, along with a Confirmation at 16. That’s a Jewish Confirmation, which I still believe was nothing more than an excuse to extort three more years of temple dues from parents who couldn’t resist doing the same thing all their friends were doing, which was sending their kids to religious school.
In all of my four years in High School, I had one fist fight, and that was during Confirmation Rehearsal. The Rabbi pulled me off some kid. I decided against throwing the Rabbi off of me and proceeding to pummel said kid.
I liked the Rabbi. He was one of those young, hip Rabbis. We were Reform Jews. That means we were more liberal, we could eat seafood, we really could do whatever we wanted, which included having hip Rabbis. I think we were the first temple to have a female Cantor. These days, there are even female Rabbis.
Years later, I would get involved with a girl who used to be Chasidic. She claimed not to be religious anymore. Still, when I told her we were Reform Jews, she just kind of snickered. “You’re not Jewish,” she said.
I admire the dedication of the Chasidic Jews. You don’t see too many cultures in America that subject their children to living in the middle of poor, depressed inner city neighborhoods, keeping to themselves, and walking around dressed head to toe in black suits. Try doing that in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the middle of a sweltering August day. Dedication or not, I consider that to be child abuse.
To a Chasidic Jew, I’m not Jewish. To me, they’re fanatics, though I don’t think they’re especially dangerous. They’re not the Taliban, much as some of them might bear a striking resemblance, minus the suits.
When asked about my religion these days, it’s more convenient to say I’m Jewish. Most people don’t have the time to hear me go on about my feelings on the matter. It’s sort of like saying, “How are you doing?” You never want the real answer to that one.
The real answer is a simple one: I don’t know. I haven’t tried that answer out on anyone yet, but I suspect that if someone asks me what religion I am, “I don’t know” might prompt some discussion.
I really don’t know what, if any, religion I am, because I don’t know what religion really is. There really is no single definition for the term. One popular definition refers to a belief in some higher power, or god, or whatever; another common one refers to practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader; a third is simply a cause, principle or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Maybe “I don’t know” is my religion. It seems like a pretty safe one to me. It’s honest. I really don’t know, and I’m not trying to pretend that I do. I don’t feel compelled to force “I don’t know” on anyone else, much less react violently if someone disagrees. In fact, if anyone does disagree on this matter, I would recommend counseling, and definitely not religious counseling. There are far more important issues to be concerned with, so anyone who would spend any energy at all on voicing their disagreement with this might want to consider they might not be spending their precious time wisely. I don’t use “I don’t know” as an excuse for anything; rather, I’m finding that “I don’t know” makes more sense to me with each passing moment, and the more I realize I don’t know, the more inspired I am to learn new things. It seems like there are always new things to learn, because this whole cycle has been keeping me pretty busy.