Categories
life

Welcome Ezra

I have to admit that this was published well after the fact so I have no pictures handy to add and I am going to dispense with the statistics for now. Despite the sparseness of this post I did want it recorded that we welcomed our fourth son to our family today and everything went perfectly (especially perfect in that Laura no longer had an insatiable itch thanks to the cholestasis brought on by the pregnancy).

Categories
culture politics

Please Don’t Vote

It’s not exactly the message you would expect to hear on election day. For those who know me it’s not a message they would ever expect to hear from me. As I drove to work this morning after casting my vote I got thinking about how destructive an uninformed vote can be. I won’t claim that there is a definable standard of what constitutes being informed. I think that is a decision that must be left to each potential voter, but for those who know they are not informed (those that can’t even see past the party label enough to recognize the party platform for example) not voting just might be your patriotic duty.

Categories
life

Working to My Strengths

After years of learning about myself in various jobs I began to have a greater understanding of what kinds of work really interested me. Following the advise and conclusions I reached from reading Paul Graham’s “How to Do What You Love” I began to seek ways to focus more on doing what I was good at in my work than those things that were mundane or tedious for me.

Interestingly the first real breakthrough for me came when I gave myself permission to dislike my job. Not that I was actively trying to dislike my job but that I relinquished the burden that came with the assumption that I must like my work. Related to that, I stopped worrying about how others might perceive my efforts at work. I abandoned the pretense that I must stay at work longer to make sure I got the minimum number of expected hours at times when I could not do anything effective with the time. Previously I stayed longer so that nobody could question my effort as a way to compensate for the fact that I had not been connecting with the current work and thus was not able to use the time effectively.