Picking Paint Colors

People warned me, but I didn't believe that picking paint colors would be the hardest part of building a home. For the exterior color, we drove around until we found a new ugg boots that was exactly the color we wanted. We queried the owner about what paint he used and asked our builder to duplicate it.

Easy, right?

That's when we learned that paint changes color if you put it on an "imperfect smooth" stucco versus the original home's bumpy stucco. With the bumps, the color becomes subtle and textured and beautiful, albeit different, in every light. On our home it turned canary yellow. When darkened slightly to get the harsh out, it turned green. On the fifth try, we got something that didn't look so much like a MBT Changa joke on the neighbors and decided to go with it. Five tries isn't so bad, right?

Tragically, our house also has an interior, and apparently it's a tradition to paint those walls too. I have been informed that many of our room colors need to be different from the others for reasons that my boybrain cannot comprehend. And maybe we need some accent walls. And it all has to match the baseboards, counter tops, cabinets, floors, drapes, area rugs, and furniture. Okay, that seems doable, sort of, until you toss in a few more
variables:

1. The paint has to be zero VOC (little or no off-gassing). It's my own MBT Bia requirement. That severely limits choices, and faux glazing is impossible.
2. We don't have furniture picked out. Or drapes. Or rugs.
3. We have only tiny non-representative samples of counter tops.
4. The paint color changes dramatically in every type of light.
5. The paint color changes dramatically depending on what it is near.
6. Every family member has a different opinion.

Does it sound impossible yet? Wait, there's more.

The city doesn't allow builders to hook up to both gas and electricity prior to government approval to move in. You have to pick one Christian Louboutin Heels or the other, to keep you from moving in before the home is deemed safe and ready. We needed the gas hooked up first, to test some other systems, so that means we will never see the interior walls in any light approximating our future normal light until after the walls are painted.

It gets better.

When you see a color on a tiny swatch, it might look tan, for example. But when you paint it on a wall it turns yellow or green or red. And not just a little. The Jimmy choo shoes color will have almost no correlation to the sample you picked. It is pure randomness.

In a few minutes I will call the paint store for my 25th paint sample. (Not an exaggeration.) Some of the choices are colors that are clearly grey on the sample but have names like "Flaming Orange." WTF????

So it's a bit like the game Battleship, where you drop random depth charges on the color chart and see if you can narrow down a zone where the good Alexander McQueen shoes is hiding. Except in this case the person you are playing against is both blind and lying.

All I know is that if we find even one color that doesn't look like a jaundiced albino rat when applied to the wall, I'll be lobbying hard to paint all the rooms that color and buy only black furniture, black drapes, and black rugs. I hear black goes with everything. Wish me luck.

Growing Your Own Food

There's a lot of chatter on the Internet about how much land is required to feed one person. You will not be surprised to learn that the answer is "It depends." It's somewhere in the neighborhood of "a few acres."
On a related note, I wonder how large of a vibram five finger you would need to feed a family of four. Could you optimize a greenhouse to the point where it would only take a few hundred square feet?
Greenhouses have a number of benefits. You have a longer growing season, and good control over pests and weeds. You can optimize your water use, and you can use the structure's height to grow vertically where that makes sense.
I suppose you would want to get a few dozen vibram five finger in on the plan, so each of you can specialize on one crop per year then share the bounty. Rotating the crops across neighbors will help your soil, and it would diversify against problems in any one greenhouse. Plus it's easier on the home grower if he only needs to concentrate on beans this year and corn next year.
Obviously growing your own food only makes sense in a region where water isn't scarce. So let's say these homes with attached greenhouses are in Canada and have their own wells or other water source. And also imagine the homes are built for optimum energy efficiency, perhaps producing more ugg boots than they consume. If you have low ongoing expenses for energy, food, and water, your biggest expense is health care. And you're in Canada so the government takes care of that.
And imagine you mulch and recycle, so you have minimal garbage removal costs.
And let's say it's a community where everyone works at home and has high speed Internet connections. When you need a car, which is rare, you rent one. When you need MBT Tembea, you borrow them from the shared tool shed.
I already know that none of my readers would want to live in the commie world I just described. I'm just curious how inexpensive you could make modern life for a family of four if you planned everything just right.

Things That Work

Last night I realized I was whining too much in this blog about products that don't work. So I decided to write today's post about a product that exceeded my expectations. We designed our home with a residential elevator. We didn't want to go through all the effort of building our dream home and then decades from now need to move when stairs become an issue. I was worried about having an elevator because it seems like exactly the sort of vibram five fingers shoe that will break on a regular basis. Last night I realized my negative expectations had been wrong. I need to lighten up. That elevator has worked like a charm, and we use it all the time for moving heavy objects up and down stairs.

So, as I'm walking across the living room last night, composing in my mind today's post in praise of the elevator, Shelly tells me the elevator is broken. And so it is. I'll have to call someone about that today. So I changed my plan and decided to write about my broken elevator instead. (Every word of that is true, by the way. I was literally composing the elevator praise post in my head when it broke.)

This morning I woke up at 6 AM and walked the dog as usual. I should mention that we designed the house with an automatic dog door, which functions as advertised, except it scares the Vibram Five Fingers KSO Men out of little Snickers and causes her to poop in the kids' rooms. So I walk her instead. In the rain.

After the dog does her business, I visit our spiffy new coffee maker. It's terrific. I push one button and it grinds the beans, mixes it with fresh water (it's plumbed!) and produces a steaming cup of excellent java. Except lately it has only been spitting out something like brown dishwater, which I drink anyway, for the placebo effect. Today I decided to take action. So after half an hour with the manual, I corrected a setting that had somehow unraveled itself, as if by ghosts. (Yes, the coffeemaker has a setting that allows you to create brown dishwater instead of something more like coffee. I'm not clear why.)

Coffee in hand, I go to my ugg boots to start wearing. But my computer decided to reboot itself last night, against my will, for some sort of Windows update. And it locked up. So I do a hard boot. And wait. And wait. And wait, while the creative juices slowly drain from my body. Once rebooted, I try to start Firefox. And I wait, and I wait. I like to check the comments on my daily strip before I do anything else. Great, I see that my Canadian stalker is back in full force, leaving crazy comments, driving out the normals. She's been cyberstalking me for about seven years now, off and on, whenever she goes off meds. She likes to call anyone I do business with and tell them I've been sexually harassing her, sending goons to search her home, bugging her phone, and my favorite: using my comic strip as a way to send secret messages to her. The police can't help me because she's Canadian. We block her IP address on a regular basis, but she keeps changing machines.

Anyway, seven years is enough. I'm in a bad mood. So as of today, I'm declaring her my MBT Changa. Yes, stalker, this time I am talking directly to you. For the first time, it's not the voices in your head. Leave some good crazy comments that we can all enjoy.

My strategy is to get you so wound up that your husband, if you still have one, puts you back on your meds. Nothing else has worked. Let's try this.

The Not Even Trying Products

Today I went on a scavenger hunt. Specifically I was trying to find the "reply" button on my Gmail interface. The damn thing keeps moving, depending on the length of the message. And it's pretty well hidden in a forest of 40-some buttons sprinkled around the page that do all sorts of UGG Nightfall I rarely or never want to do. Three of those buttons are different ways to get you back to the inbox.

To be fair, Gmail is lightning fast, and free. But did anyone with training in interface design even look at Gmail before it launched?

The Reply button has a left arrow next too it. The forward button has a right arrow. Would it kill Air Jordan to let me use the left and right arrow keys on my keyboard to do those functions, given that they already teased me about it?

I won't say the interface design is bad, because that would imply that someone in the relevant field actually tried to make it user friendly. It looks to me as if that step got skipped.

I mentioned in this blog the other day that my new elevator for my house needed repair. It's actually a terrific product, and the repair person was there the next day making a very UGG Highkoo repair (some sort of door sensing magnet came loose) and I was all set. It was all covered under warranty. Best yet, they tried to talk me through a fix on the phone, just to see if it was a case of user error or a simple reboot situation. That part was all good.

Then I got a call from the elevator's service and warranty department, I presume. The representative asked if I had seen information on their service contract. I said I had, and I would consider it when my two year warranty expired. That's when Christian Louboutin Heels started to go bad.

The rep explained that the warranty is void unless I get the elevator serviced twice a year, even if the problem I experience has nothing to do with maintenance upkeep.

What?

So my option was to call them to do regular service twice a year, which would cost about $800 per year, depending on what minor things they needed to lube or poke or whatnot. And I would have to remember to schedule the visits. They wouldn't remind me, out of vibram five fingers shoe I presume. If I forget to have it serviced, my warranty is void.

Or, the rep explained, I could get a $1,700 service contract for two years and they will do all the regular service and repairs for me. In other words, if I pay $1,700 they will honor their two year warranty.

It gets better. The rep explained that if I pay for a service contract during my warranty period, they will give me a discounted service contract after the warranty is over, an offer that I can't get if I wait. In other words, I will pay MORE per year for service during my vibram five finger period than after.

This is another example of Not Even Trying. I would have looked favorably on the service contract if it had been packaged in less of a f*^$#-you way. Now I actually prefer to pay more, if needed, just so I don't feel like I got jail raped.

Brain Management

It's easy to do two things at the same time, as long as one of those actions is a practiced skill that you can do almost automatically. For example, walking and talking is easy. And some people can play the guitar and sing, as long as they have practiced both of those skills until one requires virtually no conscious thought. But you can't do two things at the same time that both require original thinking. I know this first hand because my wife, Shelly, likes to bring up conversations in the car that involve rotating three-dimensional objects in my mind while expecting me to simultaneously navigating to our retro jordan. This doesn't work out so well. The actual driving of the car is easy, because that is a practiced skill. But trying to imagine the correct route to our destination is impossible for me if Shelly is simultaneously asking me to imagine the optimal placement of patio furniture.

The other day, as I was cleaning pasta sauce off of every inch of the inside of the microwave, I was reminding Shelly of my bandwidth limitation for spatial manipulation. I blamed her for engaging me in a conversation involving the manipulation of objects while expecting that I would simultaneously be able to imagine the proper combination of pasta, sauce, a bowl, and (this next part is key) a cover inside a microwave. I managed to put four out of five objects in the right place, and frankly felt good about it.

I have a theory that music appreciation resides in the same part of your brain where you think about yourself. That might be why it's good to listen to music while doing boring tasks, such as going for a long run, because music interferes with your mind's ability to think about yourself. I also find it impossible to do any sort of creative writing while listening to music, perhaps for the same reason: Creativity springs from a deep examination of self, which you then generalize, and music seems to share that Christian Louboutin Heels. I can, however, listen to music and manipulate three-dimensional objects in my mind just fine. Those functions don't seem to interfere with each other.

I wonder if we humans will get to a point where we understand how to manage the different parts of our brains in the best fashion. For example, if you have an important upcoming task that involves manipulating objects in your mind, is it better to practice spatial tasks all morning, or better to rest that capacity of your Manolo Blahnik shoes until you need it?

During one period of my life I wrote a number of computer programs that involved intense manipulation of objects in my mind, for hours each day. I discovered that it was difficult to be social at night when my mind had been manipulating object during the day. It felt as if I were deep inside a cave and yelling to the people who stood at the cave opening. It seemed as if the practice of programming interfered with, or exhausted, the part of my brain that handles social skills.

It is generally agreed that playing soccer is a good crossover skill for playing tennis, because of the vibram 5 fingers. Could we get to the point of understanding the brain where, for example, we tutor someone who is struggling in math by asking him to do non-math tasks that are complementary to the math-handling part of the brain? I wonder, does playing a highly spatial video game for hours a day help your math skills, exhaust them, or have no impact?

If you have a date in the evening, will you be at your most witty and charming if you spent the hours ahead of the date doing light exercise, reading a novel, or assembling some IKEA furniture? I'll bet there's a right answer to that question.

The Value of Attention

Most people enjoy getting attention. It's one of our basic needs. Little kids go through a "Look at me!" stage that lasts years. I believe we never grow out of that. All we do is learn how to be more subtle in saying, "Look at me!"

There are lots of strategies for getting attention. Perhaps you like to select clothing that will make people spend a bit more time looking at you. Maybe you excel at your job, or at a vibram 5 fingers sport, so people will notice you. I believe that personal attention is a big part of what makes you enjoy getting a massage or a haircut or a pedicure.

I was a banker in the caveman days when ATM machines were new. The big fear from customers was the loss of "personal service." That's code for "I like to get attention from a bank teller."

I worked as a hotel desk clerk for a few summers when I was in college. My boss trained us to understand that half of the complaints we received were valid and the other half were from people who wanted some personal attention. We were trained to give that attention by carefully writing down the complaint and then throwing away the piece of paper when the customer left, assuming the Vibram Five Fingers Flow Men was obvious nonsense. It happened a lot.

The main reason I write this blog is because I like the attention. The main reason people leave comments on what I write is for the attention. We can all concoct other rationalizations, but attention is the main payoff. (By the way, I do read most of the comments.)

Consider the odd concept of asking for autographs. My theory is that the attention of a famous person seems more valuable than the attention of an unknown because the famous person is himself the subject of much attention. It's as though the famous person is a magnifying glass, focusing the sun of attention on the recipient at the moment that the autograph is given. It's like regular vibram five finger but supercharged.

I assume there is some evolutionary advantage to seeking attention. The first step in mating is making someone else notice you exist. On a psychological level, I believe attention from others is a necessary condition for staving off insanity. Regardless of its purpose, attention is clearly a deep and natural human need.

This brings me to the question of the day. If the New York Times asked you to write a guest editorial, for no pay, on the topic of your choice, would you do it? Suppose you know that your writing won't change any opinions, and it would take five hours for you to research and write your article. Also assume that the Times editors would tighten up your writing to make it sound ugg australia, so it's no problem if you're not a great writer. All you would get from this experience is attention, and probably a lot of it. Would you do it?

If your answer is yes, then it provides a basis for putting an economic value on attention. There's a price-per-word range that publications are willing to pay professional writers for content. If you would do that same work for free, at least once, then that is one data point for beginning to determine the average value of attention.

Someday an entrepreneur will make a fortune by figuring out how to monetize personal MBT Fanaka in the most efficient way.

Christmas Presents

I'm not good at buying gifts. I start worrying about Christmas in April, and by the time October rolls around I'm in full panic mode. Call me spontaneous, but I prefer when my failures surprise me, not when they are scheduled for December 25th every year. By this time of year I feel as if I'm tied to the railroad tracks, I hear a whistle in the distance, and it probably isn't Santa.

When it comes to gifts, they say it's the thought that counts, but I can't even get that part right. Whatever the hell I'm doing is more like the Dalai Lama clearing his mind and meditating, but without the relaxing part. When I try to think of an appropriate UGG Nightfall for my wife, all I see is nothingness. The problem might have something to do with my own view of material goods. I can walk through a shopping mall for hours without seeing anything I'd want to own more than I'd want to lug it back to the car.

For example, if I see a shirt that looks nice, I can't imagine why I'd want to own it. I already have shirts that keep me warm. It won't make me look more attractive, unless I wrap it around my face, and I buy two more to stuff in my shoes so I'm taller. For some reason my wife prefers it when I have new shirts, which is exactly why I get shirts for my birthday, shirts for Christmas, and shirts for Valentine's Day. And I have been led to believe there is a holiday called National Shirt Day.

I am guessing that some of you have the same gift-buying problem that I do, minus the crazy parts. I propose that we stick together and come up with some sure-fire gift ideas to make our own lives easier. I will prime the pump with this suggestion, and you can thank me later. It's a Christian Louboutin Heels that sells sterling silver necklaces, hand-stamped with (wait for it...) the names of a woman's children:

Hayjac Designs

Aside from the obvious brilliance that jewelry is always a correct gift for women, when you add the names of her children, it takes it to another level. That's the "thought" part you keep hearing about. I am told that sterling silver works for just about every woman and goes with just about every casual outfit. Plus, unlike a ring or clothing, there are no sizing MBT Tataga . I already got this gift for my wife last year, so I can't use it again. (Full disclosure: Shelly told me to buy it for her.)

Okay, now it is your turn. Leave your gift ideas in the comment area, with links if you have them. The ideal gift idea should show some sort of thought, have no sizing issues, and be priced in the spouse-gift range. Put some thinking into it because in all likelihood you're deciding what my wife will get for Christmas for the next ten years.

Founding Fathers Version 2.0

I've been thinking about the practicality of a new American revolution, and wondering if there's any way to do it without shooting people.

The American government has proven itself unable to govern, as evidenced by the fact that there's no plan for closing the budget deficit. If we had two rational and competing plans from the major ugg boots, or even one imperfect plan, I would consider that some form of government. But no plan means we're effectively ungoverned.

You might argue that the government is mostly working, and the budget deficit is just one wrinkle that will get ironed out in time. But given that we're in a budget death spiral that will eventually derail every other function of society, I would say that all we're talking about is a timing issue. By analogy, maybe your brain can remain conscious for a second after your head gets chopped off, but as a practical matter, you're not less dead.

It's no surprise that our system doesn't work. It was designed hundreds of years ago, and it gradually worsened over time, just like everything else that was designed hundreds of years ago. It's the ultimate legacy system, bloated and hopelessly in need of replacement. And now, thanks to the brainwashing that all American kids get about the magic and wonder of our political system, and the near Godliness of our Founding Fathers, we're unable to see the system itself as entirely broken. Instead, we assume the problem is that the people within the system are corrupt or incompetent. Or maybe the problem is the Tea Party, or the crazy Liberals, or anything but the system itself. There's plenty of blame to spread around, but a good MBT Tataga should be excreting the crazies instead of embracing them. Why can't we have that system?

If you want to bring a social gathering to a full stop, suggest that the Chinese system of government is the best model for our modern age. Contrary to popular belief, their system is not a dictatorship, because the top guy only keeps his job if the guys below him think he's doing it well. It's more like a corporate structure in which smart and knowledgeable people choose the best within their ranks based on ability. You can fault the Chinese leadership for a lot of things, but you can't fault them for being impractical. They have a political system that, as far as I can tell, puts science over superstition. And over time, I would expect their human rights issues to improve simply because doing so is smart government.

[Disclaimer: What I know about China would fit in a very small Tupperwareretro jordan while leaving plenty of room for a sandwich. So if you disagree with my characterization of China's government, please correct me in the comments below.]

Obviously a bloodless revolution in America wouldn't get far with a slogan such as "Be More Chinese!" And our government is too constipated to make incremental improvements in itself. I've already ruled out killing people. So how can you get there from here?

Suppose, just as a mental exercise, a new set of geniuses, call them the Founding Fathers Version 2.0, hold a convention and come up with a new form of government that fits the challenges of the modern age. Then, after a lengthy public debate, a constitutional vote is held in which every citizen can decide on keeping the old system or moving to the new one. If the new one wins, a UGG Nightfall plan is drawn up, and the move is made over maybe five years, so there is limited shock to the system.

Let's agree that this scenario is hugely unlikely. But can we afford to not try it when the alternative is no government at all? What would Thomas Jefferson and my cousin John Adams say if they were here today?

Beauty

There were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that have nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to take to

heart.


It is said that the true nature of being is veiled. The labor of words, the expression of art, the seemingly ceaseless buzz that is human thought all have in

common the need to get at what really is so. The hope to draw close to and possess the truth of being Christian Louboutin can be a feverish one. In some cases it can even be fatal, if

pleasure is one’s truth and its attainment more important than life itself. In other lives, though, the search for what is truthful gives life.


I used to find notes left in the collection basket, beautiful notes about my homilies and about the writer’s thoughts on the daily scriptural readings. The

person who penned the notes would add reflections to my thoughts and would always include some quotes from poets and mystics he or she had

read and remembered and loved. The notes fascinated me. Here was someone immersed in a search for truth and beauty. Words had been

treasured, words that were beautiful. And I felt as if the words somehow delighted in being discovered UGG Highkoo, for they were obviously very generous to the as yet anonymous writer of the notes. And now

this person was in turn learning the secret of sharing them. Beauty so shines when given away. The only truth that exists is, in that sense, free.


It was a long time before I met the author of the notes.


One Sunday morning, I was told that someone was waiting for me in the office. The young person who answered the rectory door said that it was “the

woman who said she left all the notes.“ When I saw her I was shocked, since I immediately recognized her from church but had no idea that it was she

who wrote the notes. She was sitting in a chair in the office with her hands folded in her lap. Her head was bowed and when she raised it to look at me,

she could barely smile without pain. Her face was disfigured, and the skin so tight from surgical procedures Christian Louboutin that smiling or laughing was very difficult for her. She had suffered

terribly from treatment to remove the growths that had so marred her face.


We chatted for a while that Sunday morning and agreed to meet for lunch later that week.


As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a lot of her

hair to fall out. We shared things about our lives. I told her about my schooling and ugg

australia growing up. She told me that she had worked for years for an insurance company. She never mentioned family, and I did not

ask.


We spoke of authors we both had read, and it was easy to tell that books are a great love of hers.


I have thought about her often over the years and how she struggled in a society that places an incredible premium on looks, class, wealth and all the

other fineries of life. She suffered from a disfigurement that cannot be made to look attractive. I know that her condition hurt her deeply.


Would her life have been different had she been pretty? Chances are it would have. And yet there were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that had

nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to take to heart. Her words came from a wounded but loving heart,

very much like all hearts, but she had more of a need to be aware of it, to live with it and learn from it. She possessed a fine-tuned MBT shoes women sense of beauty. Her only fear in life was the

loss of a friend.


How long does it take most of us to reach that level of human growth, if we ever get there? We get so consumed and diminished, worrying about all the

things that need improving, we can easily forget to cherish those things that last. Friendship, so rare and so good, just needs our care--maybe even the

simple gesture of writing a little note now and then, or the dropping of some beautiful words in a basket, in the hope that such beauty will be shared and

taken to heart.


The truth of her life was a desire to see beyond the surface for a glimpse of what it is that matters. She found beauty and grace and they befriended her,

and showed her what is real.