The Life of Lou Ruppert

Sometimes we just need to count what we’ve gotten done instead of obsessing over what we didn’t get to. Things keep coming up that bump the things I’d planned, but I still end the day ahead of where I started. I like that. Today I may not have done any homework, and certainly didn’t make any major strides at work, but I did drop off my taxes, finally.

And when I came home, there were two white crocuses I didn’t spot yesterday, visible even in the rain, and one gorgeous variagated blue-white one in the middle of my lawn. Where did that come from?! And my compost permit showed up, which means the next time I have a free Saturday, I can go load up on free compost at one of the county recycling centers.

It was a good day, even if I might not readily admit it to myself.

It was a beautiful day today, and I was glad to have five minutes of time to walk around outside and enjoy it. Both groups of crocuses were in bloom. The lighter ones were still going a week or more after their first bloom, and the darker ones around the birch stump were more vigorous than I’d ever seen them. It’s definitely the best crocus show I’ve had so far.

These guys are still blooming strong.

And there are so many of these guys this year, and such intense colors!

I love nature! It always has a few surprises in store, and reminds me that life isn’t all about planning and failure to plan. Luck and providence can also play a role too big to ignore.

Arabic was brutal today, and the teacher actually assigned more homework for the coming week than I struggled with last week. And you know what? I love it. Everyone needs a seemingly hopeless challenge to struggle against, and I’m lucky enough to have one that won’t impact me personally if I fail at it. But if I succeed, I’ll have the tools for a cheap Mediterranean retirement, and the means to write notes to myself that nobody will be able to read. That’s a pretty good tradeoff.

I am trying not to talk about work here on my blog, but since the subject is in the news, I have to say “told you so” about the Conficker thing. The virus and the botnet it connects to are an extremely impressive technical feat, but nobody’s going to do something that would jeopardize the spam-sending credit-card-stealing cash cow they already have.

Speaking of notes nobody can read, does anyone recommend any good web resources for explaining things like public key cryptography and filesystem encryption to fairly non-technical people? It dawned on me that I might save some time next time I do a privacy consultation for a client if I don’t have to translate the geekastani into normalish on the fly. Normally I’d mention Schneier’s book, but it’s a lot to read for one small segment, and might still be more in-depth than average people would understand.

I took another half day today, but still ended up with only 60% of my Arabic homework done, none of my taxes, none of my yard work and none of my garden planning. There just aren’t enough hours in the day! No wonder computer assignments and construction projects never finish on time or within budget! We’re horrible at estimating how long something will take, or at least I am. Whenever I have a day ahead of me, part of me thinks I will be able to clear my entire todo list before bedtime. I have to admit to being a little disappointed, but I can always try again tomorrow.

Check out this week’s Bible study. Pretty heavy stuff.

It looks like I’ll need more like a week off! What was I thinking? I worked a half day today and then went home and started on the Arabic. I haven’t even gotten to the difficult parts yet! Just doing another set of basic exercises took most of my afternoon and evening. Rather than get discouraged, I’ve got to say I must be getting some sweet practice! I’ll be taking tomorrow afternoon and evening off as well. Pray I get everything done in time.

I’m considering a CSA subscription this summer with an organic farm a friend of mine works at. It’s a great way to support local agriculture and get some fresh vegetables at the same time. I doubt my garden will be ready to provide all of my summer produce, so between the two maybe I’ll still save a lot on groceries.

There aren’t enough hours in my day for me to do everything. I’m going to be cashing in a vacation day this week, hopefully, in order to try to catch up. On the one hand, that’s kind of why they’re there, but on the other it feels like a payroll advance or similar hallmark of poor money management. If I managed my time correctly, I would imagine that I would only need to use vacation time for vacation, because my non-vacation life would fit within the constraints of normal life. In practice, though, I have to use tricks like that in order to keep my life moving. If I don’t, my homework for Wednesday’s class won’t be done, my taxes won’t get filed, and my garden will never get past the planning stage. Any tips on frugal time usage?

Between the Judith Miller book I just finished, Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan, and the Neil Strauss book I just started, I’m really impressed by how fragile and unpredictable the collapse of societies can be. Taleb talks about the city of Rome going from a city of over a million people to a city of only about twelve thousand. Miller talks about how Beirut was the very picture of tolerance and peace, right up until the civil war. Strauss, in Emergency, talks about Bosnia being the same way, and about Nazi Germany gradually descending into chaos while the Jews tragically waited for things to get better. Nobody knows what tomorrow will hold.

When I was in Bosnia, I remember seeing burnt out buses and trucks along the sides of the highways. Buildings in town had huge holes in them from shelling, ten years after the war. Rumor had it that some of the older buildings were still mined to keep their occupants from returning. How does a peaceful multicultural society devolve into that state within months or years? People there acted as though nothing had ever happened, but only ten years earlier people were being lined up in death camps and slaughtered! When Rome was at its peak, did the people know that within a hundred years its population would dwindle by 99%?

It’s fun, and scary, to think sometimes that these might be the last days of our civilization. Will our cities’ populations drop by 99% in the next century? Will our diversity turn on itself in brutal acts of genocide? Will our currency bottom out like Communist Russia’s or Zimbabwe’s did? It’s freaky.

Enjoy today, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or even if it will arrive at all.

I prayed for more time this week, and ended up with more, but not in the way you might think. On Monday night, both members of my computer team were “no call no shows,” so I gained an hour or so to finish my Arabic homework, once I figured out they weren’t showing up. Today I woke up at 4am and was too sick to go to work, so during my day of bed rest, I gained a couple hours to finish reading a book I started around Christmas. I could have looked at it from the perspective of not having my team on hand to build machines for people this week, or from the standpoint of losing a day of work, but part of enjoying life is having a keen eye to spot the blessings. And I got two of them this week, albeit heavily disguised.

The crocuses bloomed today. I took a short walk around my yard when I got home from work today, but didn’t have much energy to do outdoor work, what with this cold I’m fighting. That’s why I don’t have a picture for you.

I did come close to burning my house down today. I lit a tea light this evening on my windowsill and thought I had the blinds raised high enough for it not to be an issue. Wrong. There’s now a blackened spot on the bottom of the blinds, and four of the slats are melted and deformed from the heat of the tea lamp that was placed an idiot’s hand’s breadth below them. Now I know better. It’s a good thing I wasn’t dumb enough to leave the candle burning when I wasn’t around, though I suppose being in the next room engrossed in a book is just about the same thing.

I’ve spent the night playing the same eight minute, eleven second Arabic TV clip over and over and over again. Listening is the hardest Arabic language skill for me other than reading out loud. I’ve put hours into this exercise over the course of two weeks, and have only half of the questions answered, and none of the dictation. Learning languages is hard work!

Here is my Tuesday Bible study, if anyone is interested.