Please accept my apologies for the short and boring posting this week. Today is the last official day of the fiscal quarter, and I need every last unit to ship. Every last one.
Because it doesn't count toward my quota unless those computers are loaded onto a boat or a plane or a delivery van or a little red wagon. So long as it goes.
The upside to this is that the end of the day in Asia comes a bit later than the end of the day stateside. Thank God for time zones.
Stark Street starts down by the river, cuts through the center of the city, and runs straight to hell. Storefronts are grimy, decorated with gang graffiti and the accumulated grit of day-to-day life in the breakdown lane.
-Janet Evanovich, Finger Lickin' Fifteen
Buttered popcorn flavored Jelly Bellys
Sauteed chicken, artichoke hearts, asparagus, broccoli, butter, cream, and sea salt.
Served over cavatappi.
Glass of Chardonnay.
Well, it's T minus 3 days and counting. 3 days, 3 million.
And the cast of characters who inhabit my regularly scheduled dream programming have apparently gone on strike. Only to be replaced with purchase orders, status reports, phone calls, and faxes.
Fun. Except not really.
Bolognese: lean ground beef, fresh onions, fresh mushrooms, fresh garlic, fresh tomatoes, red wine, basil, crushed red pepper, salt & pepper.
Serve over penne pasta. Top with parmesan. Pour a glass of red wine.
Enjoy.
I spent an all too short weekend with family, in the sun and in the pool and just hanging out together. Saturday, we laid in the sun and baked to a golden brown (mostly) and later we played chicken in the pool and barbequed and talked and laughed and had more fun than we deserve.
And today, my back hurts from top to bottom from all the wrestling and goofing off with the kids and from not using enough sunscreen throughout the day.
So, yeah. My back hurts. And my back hurts.
scurry
flurry
parade
waiting
goodbye
pretend
fright
hindsight
empty
changing
season
reason
pensive
apprehensive
homeland
Bonus:
escape
I see verses that say, “Teach these things to faithful men.” I don’t see “Teach these things to people who are hardly there and do little if anything.”
I see verses that say, “Do not cast your pearls before swine.” I don’t see “Cast all your pearls before swine, I mean, you know, if they ever show up.”
The Church is not an institution for the World. People mess this one up all the time. It is specifically given (Ephesians 4) for the edification of the saints. It’s for the saints not the world. You can’t run the Church off worldly wisdom but on the Wisdom of its Head, Jesus Christ.
-Jeff Weddle, Anti-Itch Meditation
Adding to this, I'm saddened by the lack of serious discipleship in so many modern churches. Please don't teach me 5 easy ways to live a happier, more productive, wealthier life. Please don't cherry-pick the scriptures and then bend them to support your "message." Please don't pretend that your self-help psycho-babble has anything to do with following Christ.
Please DO teach me how to conform myself to Him; encourage me to draw closer to Him so that He can change my heart. It's only in becoming a little-Christ that one can successfully leave the walls of the church to reach the world.
Please DO re-read the book of
Titus. For all our sakes.
Traffic Girl: "There sure are a lot of cars on the road. It must be rush hour."
insert sarcastic comment here
There are days, like today, where just putting one foot in front of the other is all the motivation one can muster. I learned a long time ago that you can't sit around and wait for motivation to show up. Nope.
Motion creates motivation. Just taking the first step, making the first sales call of the day, sending out the first quote, just getting my mind and body into the activity of this work gets the work done.
And just like running the marathon (which this totally is, by the way), once you make it past the first couple of miles, motivation shows up and you could run forever. Or at the very least, make it to the finish line.
Come on motivation! I'm working for ya!
Just because the only interesting thing on TV is a History Channel documentary about physics and physicists and their theories of the origins of the universe doesn't mean you have to stay up and watch THE WHOLE THING.
You need more than five hours of sleep, Jennifer. Get with the program.
One of the biggest challenges to any sales professional is the Lost Deal. And I don't mean some long-shot 10% chance deal where you're really just the extra bid that makes the purchase award seem fair.
Nope, I'm talking about the deal where you WORK IT. You met the right people, determined the budget, provided a great discount, and gotten acceptance of your offer, only to have the entire thing disappear in the black hole of budget cuts.
A big part of the anger and frustration is this overwhelming disappointment in yourself and your abilities. That somehow you're not good enough, even when people exaggerate the truth or outright lie or when circumstances fall beyond anyones' control. It sucks.
And what really makes it suck is that every sale, every dollar and penny, is what helps pay the bills. It's your paycheck being affect.
The bigger picture to this, and what stays in my mind every single day, is that I'm not alone in this. There are individuals who depend upon my spending money in order to keep the lights on and put food on the table. Just as I need my customers to purchase what I'm selling*, I need to be a good customer to other individuals and business.
*Please don't misunderstand my motivation in sales. Yes, it's a career and I get paid to do it, but I also really believe in the products I sell and the ways it can help my customers. I make money, but they make the future.
Is it just me or are the sandals this summer particularly hideous?
Down with gladiator sandals!
I've got ten days to make $5 million. You read that right. Five. Million. Dollars.
That's half a million a day, every day.
I'm already having those chewing gum dreams, and I'm expecting the T-Rex to show up by the middle of next week. Unless he gets drained by the vampire - the latest addition to a growing cast of anxiety-based characters who inhabit my sleeping mind.
Well put and worth really thinking about:
Watching George [Takei] and Brad [Altman] together that night, it was hard to see how they were a threat to the institution of marriage. Oh, the institution is in trouble alright. Welfare policies that give young, poor women a financial incentive not to marry the father of their children (and, in turn, give the fathers an excuse to not take responsibility for their children) have destroyed marriage in the inner cities. The societal acceptance of middle-aged upper-middle class women adopting (or having, or surrogating, or whatevering) babies without bothering to include a father/husband in the picture has been a fiasco for marriage.
The glorification of knucklehead celebrities who use marriage as just another publicity stunt for their new movie/CD/reality show (host “Saturday Night Live,” get married, drop by “The View,” get divorced…) hasn’t helped. Neither has no-fault divorce, the all-purpose ripcord for the terminally lazy (because it’s easier to get divorced than to apologize for being such a shmuck).
. . .
Conservatives: go libertarian on this one! Let the states decide, call it something else: union, partnership, really really going steady. And to George and Brad, much happiness and a belated “mazel tov” from Dick Cheney and me.
- Dave Konig, Think Pink @ Big Hollywood
Go ahead and read the whole article, if you dare. Not only is it full of sound reasoning, it's funny too.
sullen (adj) - showing irritation or ill humor by a gloomy silence or reserve
maudlin (adj) - tearfully or weakly emotional; foolishly sentimental
truculent (adj) - fierce; cruel; savagely brutal; brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing
petulant (adj) - moved to or showing sudden, impatient irritation, esp. over some trifling annoyance
I don't want to do this today. I want to crawl back under the covers. I want to lay in the sun by (not in) the pool. I want to read a book, a trashy, useless, pointless novel.
I want to be on summer break.
A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry.
Ecclesiastes 10:19
If you enjoy going to the community pool with your family, you may not want to read this.
I read it. And I may not ever swim in a public pool again. Some juicy excerpts:
In a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in April and May, 17 percent admitted relieving themselves in a swimming pool.
Sometimes, an indoor swimming pool will emit a strong chemical smell. The swimmers have coughs or red, stinging eyes after emerging from the pool. Usually those symptoms get dismissed as the effects of chlorine, but their causes are something more organic.
When swimmers sweat or urinate in the pool water, the bodily fluids combine with the chlorine. It creates chloramines, which causes the strange odor and the eye and respiratory irritations for swimmers, according to the CDC.
*shudder*
Thanks to WolframAlpha I learned that on the day of my birth, the moon was Waxing Crescent. And on the day of Handsome's birth, the moon was Waning Gibbous.
A perfect match.
My advice to you: don't leave carbonated water in the freezer overnight.
Because you'll eventually remember, say about 11:00 the next evening. Then you'll put the frozen-solid two-liter bottle in the sink to thaw out.
Then . . . BOOM!
Last three ingredients in my conditioner: Hexyl Cinnamal, Limonene, Linalool.
Sounds more like they should be characters in a fantasy novel.
The Capellini sisters. The eldest, auburn-haired Cinnamal, living under the curse of an angry sorceress and focused on removing the hex despite repeated failures. And the clever and capricious twins, Limonene (Neenie) and Linalool (Lina), who spend their time flirting with local bachelors.
And of course, let's not forget their parents, Methyl & Butyl Paraben. And their brothers, Ethyl & Propyl.
[A]lmost all of the Star Trek films suffered from what professional cineastes call extreme suckitude. The result couldn’t possibly be that much worse than the first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or ninth Star Trek films. And guess what? The new Star Trek movie is better than all of those films.
. . .
(I always wanted to write an SNL skit called “What if Gene Roddenberry Wrote World War II.” The whole war would involve Churchill and FDR karate chopping or neck-pinching their way across Europe, all the way to Hitler’s bunker, where FDR and Hitler would find it necessary to fight in a gladiatorial pit with long spears.)
- Jonah Goldberg, Star Trek 2.0
Hey Mom, you and Dad gotta go see this movie. At the theater. Seriously. I'm not kidding. There will be a test. ;-)
side note: I really, really enjoyed Star Trek. I'm not even going to admit publicly how many times I've been to the theater to see it. Jennifer = sci-fi geek.
Transporters.
There are places I'd like to go and things I'd like to do. And the biggest obstacle is travel time.
*sigh*
Remember this?
Do remember. Remember that not all the walls fell. That communism isn't defeated. That people were killed that day, and every day since.
If "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," then remember the man in front of the tanks.
Remember that he was never heard from again.
Girl (8): What are you going to do tonight when you get home?
Woman (35): Well, I'm going to exercise and afterward make some dinner.
Girl (8): Oh. When are you going to play?
Woman (35): Making dinner is kinda like play.
Girl (8): No, I mean REALLY play. When are you going to PLAY?
whirligig (n): something that whirls or revolves; a giddy or flighty person
shuttlecock (n): the object that is struck back and forth in badminton and battledore, consisting of a feathered cork head and a plastic crown
flibbertigibbet (n): a chattering or flighty, light-headed person
kerfuffle (n): disorder, commotion
What the heck is the deal with all the giant handbags? I have luggage that is smaller than some of the these bags. Heck, I'm smaller than some of these bags.
Talk about losing your keys and loose change.
Wife: Honey, have you seen my car keys?
(unwitting) Husband: Well, they're not on the dresser or desk or in the refrigerator, babe. Maybe they fell in the Grand Canyon.
Wife: *blink*
Husband: Er. Um. I mean, maybe they're at the bottom of your "purse." *ducks to avoid flying objects*
After reading much, and thinking much, about the murder of abortionist George Tiller this past Sunday, I was surprised to read this:
We accept that when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders--had Tiller whipped out a gun at an elementary school, we would now be applauding his murderer's actions. In this case, the law was powerless because the law supported late-term abortions. Moreover, that law had been ruled outside the normal political process by the Supreme Court. If you think that someone is committing hundreds of gruesome murders a year, and that the law cannot touch him, what is the moral action? To shrug? Is that what you think of ordinary Germans who ignored Nazi crimes? Is it really much of an excuse to say that, well, most of your neighbors didn't seem to mind, so you concluded it must be all right? We are not morally required to obey an unjust law. In fact, when the death of innocents is involved, we are required to defy it.
- Megan McArdle, The War on the War on Abortion*
Read the whole thing. Please.
It's a reasonable discussion to have. Mainly because what Scott Roeder did was absolutely wrong. You can't hold the moral high ground on "the culture of life," if you go around murdering your opponents. Or can you?
The men who led the Holocaust butchered nearly 6 million Jews, at least 2 million Soviet POWs, as many as 2 million Poles, approximately a million Romani, half a million disabled persons, ten thousand homosexuals, and thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses. Quick math: more than 10 million souls. (source:
Wikipedia)
It took a World War to stop the madness.
In America, since 1973, nearly 50 million unborn humans have been aborted.
50 Million. I wonder what it will take to stop this modern madness.
*HT: Godsbody
