Snowy pines

Lazy days are a mixed bag. It is a chance to rest up of course, just lazing around unless it's either a dark winters night or a rainy spring afternoon is really wasteful and unproductive. Usually during the lazier days I'll try to catch up on some reading or maybe watch and empty out some of the tv programs on the DVR.

The only exceptions to that are the aforementioned dark winters night and rainy spring afternoons. For those particular days it's best to brew up some hot chocolate or tea and indeed just laze about watching the weather unfold. Sometimes I think it would be wonderful to curl up with poetry, but I have no idea even where to start with that, so I tend to nap. 🙂

Old broken TV

Over time the one thing I've learned pretty reliably is that there are no must-see TV shows. Television is crap. It can certainly fill up idle time and it can provide background noise while you are doing other things, like eating and such, but on the whole, television hasn't contributed to the quality of my life for a very long while.

That isn't to say that television doesn't have anything entertaining in it, just that if I don't have a television, I don't feel it's absence in my life. The entertainment and reward I get from reading a book or sharing stories with others I like or love is far more rewarding to me than anything on television. If I have a choice between reading a book or TV, the book wins. If I have a choice between talking with friends or TV, the friends win. Television is what is on when you don't mind it's mindless chatter.

So, no, I have no must-see TV shows.

Angel

Back in the day I caught a whiff of real creative rewards when I was busy programming computers to do tasks. Mostly they were classwork programs but a few were based on my own pursuits. The high from creating these things was palpable however those days have passed. I don't really have room in my life to program anymore. It's given way to writing, although for that it's mostly just me writing opinion pieces and social networking screes on Google Plus. The rewards aren't as profound as they were when I was at the end of a long programming task, but they give a little pleasure.

Now that I think about it some more, I would also say that being creative at my work, writing novel SQL code lies somewhere in between computer programming and writing. I value the time I have to devote to it and the reward is almost as rich as it was when I was writing computer programming code.

I really think that the longer something takes, the more you put into a project the more you get out of it. The rewards for a multiweek computer programming project, toiling away with debugging and testing edge conditions and refining the code leads to a huge blaze of rewarding feelings when the final product is running correctly.

As for inspiration, that usually comes from necessity. Mostly that is either my own curiosity, my opinions, or some task that is assigned to me at work for some grander purpose that I usually don't understand.

Little Green Men statues in Little Green Man Store Command

I don't doubt that aliens have visited this planet and likely continue to do so. I do think that they avoid the local indigenous species on the planet because they are prone to paranoia, out of control behaviors, and are generally messy creatures. If they are witnessed they are only done so from a distance and likely when actually some contact is established it's only with a single yokel who is best left to yammer along that he or she had first contact through the fog of alcohol on their breath.

I fervently believe that the government has suppressed evidence of alien visitations in the past, but I congratulate them for it. People would lose their collective marbles if the world was clearly not alone in the Universe when it came to life. We live a comfortable fantasy-life that we are the only creatures in the entire Universe that are sentient. Notice I didn't say intelligent, you can have sentience without intelligence. Look at politics.

I think a good portion of the existence of aliens is predicated on the sheer number of stars, planets, and of those the habitable ones. Then you factor in natural curiosity and the sky has to be teeming with alien life and a lot of it should be zipping around Earth curious about our infant species.

I don't think we are ready for first contact. We are too wound up in religion to ever be allowed off the planet. For the time being, we are really a leper race, our behaviors are too erratic and we are too immature to make first contact and be respected afterwards. We'd likely militarize the entire endeavor and make an utter ass of ourselves as a species.

A Sure-Fire Approach to Improving Your Writing (and Getting Over Writer’s Block)
http://lifehacker.com/5844427/

Money

I save money by keeping a budget. The budget provides a framework of knowing. Knowing when it is best for me to say no to buying something. If I have gone without, and I suffer for it then that is a lesson that I needed to learn. I can make trade offs, something I want goes by the wayside to pay for something I need. I need food and shelter, the rest? Mostly wants. A need can only be deferred for a short time, but a want could be eliminated altogether if times are rough and money is tight.

Flock of Birds

There are a few things that really get my goat. First and foremost I really detest repeating myself. Nothing is worse than having to say the same thing over and over again until people finally catch what it is that you are trying to convey. The irritation on this is so strong that I will actually just walk away from what I was trying to express because the initial investment in trying to communicate just can't hold up to the irritable cost of having to say it over and over again.

Another thing that gets me is listening to people eat. The wet sloppy sounds of mastication and the gasping gurgling of swallowing make me sick and angry. Usually the only way I can avoid this irritation is if I'm eating as well, then it doesn't bother me anymore.

Finally, but not least is the anger and irritation when people are willfully stupid or obnoxiously incurious. If you don't want to learn something new then perhaps you'd prefer to just commit suicide. If you don't care to know and aren't interested in anything new, then what exactly are you doing with your life? Just enduring some mechanical endurance trial? You aren't impressing anyone. Find something you know nothing about and learn more about it. Each and every day. Or admit that you are a banal unimaginative machine and just kick off already.

Atomic Fountain

Daylight savings time really only helped people many years ago. Now it just irritates everyone. The irritation for me is the arbitrary selection of the time when we shift all our clocks forward or backward. It really irks me that the date of this time change can be adjusted by a government and force that change on the rest of the world. It was all started to help people cope with the inexorable march that sunset has as we approach winter. It's inescapable if you are north or south of the tropical latitudes.

One thing that I have noticed is that the daylight savings time is hardest on my pets. They are used to mealtime being at 9pm, but take tonight, right after the daylight savings time change has happened, they know approximately that they get fed at a certain time and while the clock reads 8pm, they are pestering us for food because last night 8pm was really 9pm and it was time for dinner. It's impossible for us to explain to our pets why we pick two days of the year when we all collectively agree that the time we think it is really isn't the time it actually is.

All of this silliness is tempered by the fact that all of our time demarcations are wholly made up concepts. When did it start? Thanks to the Church we've marked zero at a certain point in the past. Then we get upset here and there when some of us think that time is all run out, that the second coming is upon us, it's all stupid and made up and utterly contrived.

So I don't think there is room any more in our society for daylight savings time. We should establish the time zones permanently, so if it's going to be GMT-5, then lets stay with that and let the seasons do as they will, sunrise and sunset when they come and we will cope.

Speaking of coping, I can't imagine how these time shifts affect people who are suffering from seasonal affective disorder. Perhaps by letting this anachronistic self-deception cease and people can cope with the change in the seasons. Because for those suffering from SAD, it's gotta be a little relief to not have the hours bouncing around when the changes in the seasons are so pronounced. The only other solution for those people would be to migrate towards the tropical latitudes.

So, for daylight savings time – off with it's head! 🙂

Airplane! The movie

Airplane!

Clue

Noises Off

Princess Bride

9 to 5