My goal: to be the most moderate person IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!!!!

To my surprise, googling on that yields nothing, though it seems like a very obvious joke.

Mini-existential crisis–I wrote two new book blog entries, which took forever (maybe 45 minutes each) when they were forgettable books that I though deserved maybe a sentence each; I’ve been asked to do book reviews for a new newspaper & don’t know if I want to/ought to/would regret saying no. How to balance wanting to try & do everything with having the normal spacetime limitations? My coping strategy for most of my life has been to do a bit of what I most want to do at any given moment, then use denial and procrastination to avoid making decisions. Hmm…somehow that doesn’t seem to to turn out particularly well. Strange!

I just finished Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, which is such a remarkable, mindblowing, thought-provoking book that it made me think of the best books I’ve ever read so that I can put it on the list.

Five Best/Most Interesting/Most Mind-blowing Books I’ve Ever Read (The Ones That Jump to Mind, At Least)

  • Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
  • A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
  • Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter
  • On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  • Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin

Star Trek Generation X

  • I started running again this week! The days are getting longer and the roads are dry (no precipitation for the past 8 days–amazing!). I only went 3 miles today (1 – 1 1/2 3 times during the week) because I’m so out of shape, but boy it felt good.
  • I think I’ve discovered the key to making the FlyLady system work for me: it’s the after-work routine. Just 3 steps: sort the mail, declutter for 15 minutes, then tea/toast/Buffy (I just got the first 4 seasons on DVD) until Jonathan gets home. “You can do anything for 15 minutes!” (J, trying to encourage me, accidentally said “You can do anything IN 15 minutes.” Ha! I wish!) It’s really been helping so far. Oh, and I tidy the kitchen while making the tea and toast.
  • I was just about to buy a new Dell but I missed the free-flat-panel monitor offer so postponed again. My main hesitation was the royal pain of moving all my documents off this one (which is now 5 years old). And holding up my monitor is my old Macintosh Performa–full of documents I still hadn’t moved off! But with J’s help I made some inroads this weekend. After I’ve finally ditched it (hey, if anyone wants a Performa 6220CD just for the cost of shipping, let me know!), then I can think about a new Dell again.
  • On the Mac I found an old project: Jonathan’s single-panel cartoon Star Trek Generation X. He drew it in 1995 (or maybe earlier), so it’s maybe dated now, but I still think it’s hysterically funny. I had scanned it but was unable to get it into web-friendly form that would fit on a screen and be legible, so it’s been on my Mac’s hard drive since about 1998. J suggested trying a PDF, and bingo: only 33 K and it looks passable. Googling “Star Trek Generation X” reveals that others have had the same idea (presumably after he did), but IMO his is much funnier and pithier. So click here to see classic Trek and classic grunge together at last.