I have read a couple of books by Thomas Sowell. He's an economist that also comments on things. Over the years he's written a lot of really good stuff and has a lot of really good quotes out there. Many of the quotes are memes that float by in my streams.
The books that I've read by him were usually compilations of columns that he wrote for newspapers. I enjoyed them and I got a lot out of them. My favorite chapters were the columns that he titled Thoughts on the Passing Scene.
In those, he would just shoot off one-liners for an entire column or, in my case, chapter in a book. Those comments were inspirations for me and my style of writing. I'm not as erudite as he is, and I'm not the best raconteur.
But I learned a lot from him. And even though the way I passed economics classes in college was to find the biggest guy and then sleep on the desk behind him during lectures, Thomas Sowell's ideas on economic policy are sound and he explains them well.
Check out "Barbarians Inside The Gates" by Thomas Sowell:
https://a.co/d/16Nr8CX
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Monday, February 2, 2026
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Purposefully slowing down ~
I have been doing is purposefully slowing down lately.
For most of my life I lived on a hair trigger. Everything would send me into a really fast reaction. Good, bad or indifferent, I was going to react.
A question would be asked and I gave an answer. Something was talked about and I had something to say about it. As I got older I tried to slow down, but my work was such that I still had to keep a sharp edge. So I did.
Now, as I am getting older I'm pausing a lot more. I'm thinking a lot more. I'm trying not to say negative things or even comment on things that I really don't agree with. It's challenging because many of the people around me are talkers, and there is no gap in the conversation for me to process what's been said and respond in a calm and decent way.
It's hard to get a word in edgewise. So I stick with being quiet.
I've also found that when I try to make decisions and people disagree with my decisions conflict arises. I've faced conflict a lot and I've handled it a lot. Good, bad, or indifferent, I got a resolution. Now I just kind of back off and let things go the way they're going. If I think they're headed for disaster I may say something, but sometimes I think "you know, they are adults and they're making good decisions I don't really think they're going to like where they end up" and let it go at that.
It's led to friction. Where I used to be the one snapping and quickly commenting now others do that. Sometimes it's fun to watch them get angry where that used to be what I did. I smile and I shake my head and I go and do my thing.
But I find it fascinating slowing down and contemplating my responses. Before I would just shoot from the hip. Often times there's no response to be given because none was requested. I'm even trying to develop the habit of asking, do you want me to listen or do you want me to suggest things?
I like this new pace. Very challenging.
+++
For most of my life I lived on a hair trigger. Everything would send me into a really fast reaction. Good, bad or indifferent, I was going to react.
A question would be asked and I gave an answer. Something was talked about and I had something to say about it. As I got older I tried to slow down, but my work was such that I still had to keep a sharp edge. So I did.
Now, as I am getting older I'm pausing a lot more. I'm thinking a lot more. I'm trying not to say negative things or even comment on things that I really don't agree with. It's challenging because many of the people around me are talkers, and there is no gap in the conversation for me to process what's been said and respond in a calm and decent way.
It's hard to get a word in edgewise. So I stick with being quiet.
I've also found that when I try to make decisions and people disagree with my decisions conflict arises. I've faced conflict a lot and I've handled it a lot. Good, bad, or indifferent, I got a resolution. Now I just kind of back off and let things go the way they're going. If I think they're headed for disaster I may say something, but sometimes I think "you know, they are adults and they're making good decisions I don't really think they're going to like where they end up" and let it go at that.
It's led to friction. Where I used to be the one snapping and quickly commenting now others do that. Sometimes it's fun to watch them get angry where that used to be what I did. I smile and I shake my head and I go and do my thing.
But I find it fascinating slowing down and contemplating my responses. Before I would just shoot from the hip. Often times there's no response to be given because none was requested. I'm even trying to develop the habit of asking, do you want me to listen or do you want me to suggest things?
I like this new pace. Very challenging.
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Sunday, January 25, 2026
Fun computer stuff ~
I love doing fun and different things with computers! Over the past few years that's shifted to where I do them mostly with my phone because it's handy and with me all the time. And I've reached a milestone that I don't know if it's good or bad or not.
The milestone is: I know how to do something on my phone, but I'm not sure how to do it on my computer. This something is to have a folder of recipe images and pick one of the recipes randomly and have it emailed to me on a specific day of the week or month.
When I went back to college, after certifying as a controller, I majored in computer information systems. In my junior and senior time, in my 11 year college career, I did a lot of simple programming. I really enjoyed it.
At work, I demonstrated abilities to automate things and used those abilities to get different positions, working in an office or automating things that we did or used every day. Very custom solutions for problems that we needed solved.
It was fun, but it was always on a computer and it was almost always using some form of basic programming language. A lot of Windows batch files and scripts, but mostly Visual Basic and then Basic and other things.
One of my favorites after I had been programming for a while was Auto-It. It's a scripting system that allowed me to use my basic programming skills and allowed me to actually create Windows apps just with scripting.
I would compile them and then I had a fully executable little app. It was hard because a lot of questionable things were done with Auto-It by people out there on the internet, but I never did any of that stuff.
But now I want a random recipe from a folder and I'm finding that I reach for my phone to do it instead of a computer keyboard. Because of that, the puzzle shifts. I have to find a way to synchronize the folder to my phone or put them all out on the internet and then pick randomly from there and just send a link so that you can pop it open or something like that.
I just think it's funny that my first thought was, how do I do this on my phone?
Progress...
+++
The milestone is: I know how to do something on my phone, but I'm not sure how to do it on my computer. This something is to have a folder of recipe images and pick one of the recipes randomly and have it emailed to me on a specific day of the week or month.
When I went back to college, after certifying as a controller, I majored in computer information systems. In my junior and senior time, in my 11 year college career, I did a lot of simple programming. I really enjoyed it.
At work, I demonstrated abilities to automate things and used those abilities to get different positions, working in an office or automating things that we did or used every day. Very custom solutions for problems that we needed solved.
It was fun, but it was always on a computer and it was almost always using some form of basic programming language. A lot of Windows batch files and scripts, but mostly Visual Basic and then Basic and other things.
One of my favorites after I had been programming for a while was Auto-It. It's a scripting system that allowed me to use my basic programming skills and allowed me to actually create Windows apps just with scripting.
I would compile them and then I had a fully executable little app. It was hard because a lot of questionable things were done with Auto-It by people out there on the internet, but I never did any of that stuff.
But now I want a random recipe from a folder and I'm finding that I reach for my phone to do it instead of a computer keyboard. Because of that, the puzzle shifts. I have to find a way to synchronize the folder to my phone or put them all out on the internet and then pick randomly from there and just send a link so that you can pop it open or something like that.
I just think it's funny that my first thought was, how do I do this on my phone?
Progress...
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Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Resurrected peace lily ~
I have a Peace Lily that I resurrected. At least that's how I think of it. It's a potted plant that my wife was given when her mother died. A bunch of her sisters in the spirit pooled their money and bought her a really big pot with a really big Peace Lily in it.
It was really beautiful. My wife is not the greatest with potted plants. She does okay, but she tends to put them out in direct sunlight after they've been inside and used to being inside for months and years.
She'll put them out to get the rain and then she'll forget for three days and they get baked in the sun. She's an irregular waterer, which is okay with some plants, but not okay for the majority of the ones that we have.
Plants like a constant environment with a constant flow of water, even if it's a little bit each week. They adapt and live according to what they're getting on a regular basis. If it's not regular, they don't do well in my experience.
My wife did good with her Peace Lily at first. It was too big to put on the deck with the other plants that I had and so she had it on the front porch. It got beat down by afternoon sun for six hours or so and I told her during summer she would have to water it every day. I helped her by setting up an automatic drip solar system that would water it every day between certain hours just to keep it moist. I think that helped a lot and it flourished on the front porch.
Winter came. It got cold. It dropped to 10 degrees which is very different where we live. It dropped to 10 degrees three or four times and the peace lily died. All the leaves turned black and everything just looked really bad and dead.
She brought it in after it had been beat up by the cold she dropped it in our big bathtub. When spring came and nothing grew we put the pot under the deck and left it.
I went under the deck for some reason and was scrounging around for something. I saw this big pot and I remembered how big the peace lily had been. I was starting a new thing with lemongrass. I bought lemongrass at one of the asian marketplaces near us and rooted them, then put them in tall pots on the deck. My hope was that the lemongrass would repel mosquitoes. It helped a little but I love the smell and I love the look.
But I looked at the peace lily pot. I scraped the top of it and scraped all the dead stuff off. I thought to myself that with the root system that that big peace lily plant had there had to be something down there that might come back.
So I put the pot up on the deck. I let it get beat down by the Sun every day, but I watered it every day, too. An entire jug of water.
It sprouted leaves and it sprouted more leaves and it started growing and doing its thing. I was happy to see that the peace lily came back!
In the fall I was crabby about it because I really didn't want a big plant like this inside. I also knew that watering it inside would be a pain because it's a big pot, I mean it's two feet across. And heavy! So I bought a tub and put some pavers in the bottom of the tub. I put the pot on top of the pavers and rigged up something so that we could dump water in the pot and it would drain, but not stay in the pot. It would go in the tub of water underneath. And then I bought one of those battery operated siphoning pump things and I would use the drained water to water the peace lily every other day or so.
The plant flourished over the winter! I was amazed. The plant flourished during spring. I kept rotating it so that the leaves would have to tilt to get the sun from the windows, but we've decided to keep the peace lily inside and let it keep growing.
My hope is that it will bloom sometime this year. I'll keep using my little siphon pump thing to recirculate the water in my little watering system I've set up.
It's fun to bring plants back like that, especially when they have meaning like this one does.
+++
It was really beautiful. My wife is not the greatest with potted plants. She does okay, but she tends to put them out in direct sunlight after they've been inside and used to being inside for months and years.
She'll put them out to get the rain and then she'll forget for three days and they get baked in the sun. She's an irregular waterer, which is okay with some plants, but not okay for the majority of the ones that we have.
Plants like a constant environment with a constant flow of water, even if it's a little bit each week. They adapt and live according to what they're getting on a regular basis. If it's not regular, they don't do well in my experience.
My wife did good with her Peace Lily at first. It was too big to put on the deck with the other plants that I had and so she had it on the front porch. It got beat down by afternoon sun for six hours or so and I told her during summer she would have to water it every day. I helped her by setting up an automatic drip solar system that would water it every day between certain hours just to keep it moist. I think that helped a lot and it flourished on the front porch.
Winter came. It got cold. It dropped to 10 degrees which is very different where we live. It dropped to 10 degrees three or four times and the peace lily died. All the leaves turned black and everything just looked really bad and dead.
She brought it in after it had been beat up by the cold she dropped it in our big bathtub. When spring came and nothing grew we put the pot under the deck and left it.
I went under the deck for some reason and was scrounging around for something. I saw this big pot and I remembered how big the peace lily had been. I was starting a new thing with lemongrass. I bought lemongrass at one of the asian marketplaces near us and rooted them, then put them in tall pots on the deck. My hope was that the lemongrass would repel mosquitoes. It helped a little but I love the smell and I love the look.
But I looked at the peace lily pot. I scraped the top of it and scraped all the dead stuff off. I thought to myself that with the root system that that big peace lily plant had there had to be something down there that might come back.
So I put the pot up on the deck. I let it get beat down by the Sun every day, but I watered it every day, too. An entire jug of water.
It sprouted leaves and it sprouted more leaves and it started growing and doing its thing. I was happy to see that the peace lily came back!
In the fall I was crabby about it because I really didn't want a big plant like this inside. I also knew that watering it inside would be a pain because it's a big pot, I mean it's two feet across. And heavy! So I bought a tub and put some pavers in the bottom of the tub. I put the pot on top of the pavers and rigged up something so that we could dump water in the pot and it would drain, but not stay in the pot. It would go in the tub of water underneath. And then I bought one of those battery operated siphoning pump things and I would use the drained water to water the peace lily every other day or so.
The plant flourished over the winter! I was amazed. The plant flourished during spring. I kept rotating it so that the leaves would have to tilt to get the sun from the windows, but we've decided to keep the peace lily inside and let it keep growing.
My hope is that it will bloom sometime this year. I'll keep using my little siphon pump thing to recirculate the water in my little watering system I've set up.
It's fun to bring plants back like that, especially when they have meaning like this one does.
+++
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Water Music ~
I've always enjoyed Water Music by Handel. I remember hearing it in college in a music appreciation class. His Music for the Royal Fireworks is right up there with it, especially since they tend to be packaged together on albums by orchestras and symphonies.
But I love listening to it when I'm driving or when I'm doing things and I want to just think differently. It cracks me up that this classical music was sponsored and paid for by kings and nobles and now I get to play it whenever I want instead of having to hire a quartet to sit in the corner of a room while I do my thing. I just play it on a smart speaker or even better in my headphones so I augment my reality with music for the nobility.
If you've never listened to Water Music you should give it a try, I highly recommend it!
Here are a couple of links:
YouTube
https://youtu.be/mAyiidg25uE?si=23yj_2bl2Slato35
YouTube Music
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lQO1WV0uMAbb4FNLy8Qqc0KMssKPPUP6c&si=Oi_9VdhbYJCW5YFZ
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/0cxRAewBpYrtxOYH5fius3?si=wScHFP_0TUi78YsSKGWTPw
+++
But I love listening to it when I'm driving or when I'm doing things and I want to just think differently. It cracks me up that this classical music was sponsored and paid for by kings and nobles and now I get to play it whenever I want instead of having to hire a quartet to sit in the corner of a room while I do my thing. I just play it on a smart speaker or even better in my headphones so I augment my reality with music for the nobility.
If you've never listened to Water Music you should give it a try, I highly recommend it!
Here are a couple of links:
YouTube
https://youtu.be/mAyiidg25uE?si=23yj_2bl2Slato35
YouTube Music
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lQO1WV0uMAbb4FNLy8Qqc0KMssKPPUP6c&si=Oi_9VdhbYJCW5YFZ
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/0cxRAewBpYrtxOYH5fius3?si=wScHFP_0TUi78YsSKGWTPw
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Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Tried to make glowing bubbles ~
It's funny, I finally gave in and tried an experiment that I've been seeing pass by in my streams on the internet. Recently I went out on my deck around 10:30pm. I got a bottle of bubbles. And I cracked a glow stick and got it glowing.
Then I cut the glue stick open and poured it into the bubbles. Then I blew bubbles to see if the bubbles would glow as they floated away.
Sadly, they did not glow.
I blew a lot of bubbles in the middle of the night. My wife and I thought we saw a couple of them with a little bit of a tint of glow in the reflection, but they did not glow.
It was a fun experiment and I got to check it off my to-do list so that's always a bonus. But you've got to be careful with that stuff on the Internet, some of it's a little bit crazy. Like the balance beam thing that I'm doing in the basement. But that's a different story.
+++
Then I cut the glue stick open and poured it into the bubbles. Then I blew bubbles to see if the bubbles would glow as they floated away.
Sadly, they did not glow.
I blew a lot of bubbles in the middle of the night. My wife and I thought we saw a couple of them with a little bit of a tint of glow in the reflection, but they did not glow.
It was a fun experiment and I got to check it off my to-do list so that's always a bonus. But you've got to be careful with that stuff on the Internet, some of it's a little bit crazy. Like the balance beam thing that I'm doing in the basement. But that's a different story.
+++
Friday, January 9, 2026
Dangerous internet things ~
I enjoy surfing the web. I don't feel like the Silver Surfer but I do have certain places that I haunt. I enjoy certain news sites, that way I get a filtered view of the world. I enjoy Instagram, although I use it less and less because of the every-other-post-is-advertising thing.
I actually look at Pinterest almost every night when I'm at home, but I'm more just mindlessly scrolling and grabbing screenshots of memes that I think would be fun to see in the future when I'm sitting on the couch or wanting to post something but don't know what. Encouraging memes, stuff I can use on postcards, that sort of thing. I also get ideas from Pinterest. I built a rain capture rig that was modeled after something I saw on Pinterest.
But anyways, a few weeks ago some of the fitness guru people that drift through my feeds. They were talking about how squats and horse stance exercises will extend your life. So I now have my phone remind me to squat every couple of hours. Fully clothed, mind you, but squat down and hold that in a resting position for at least 10 seconds, sometimes up to two minutes.
I do horse stances infrequently but when I do them my thighs burn and my body says, what are you doing? Another thing I saw was people balancing on boards that were on wobbly bases. The main wobbly base that I saw was a PVC pipe that was two and a half or three inches wide.
It was almost like they were skateboarding, but there were no wheels. They were just balancing and wobbling back and forth. They claimed that the wobbling imbalance helped them strengthen their core and their lower extremities and improve their balance overall. And that seniors and people close to being seniors could benefit from doing balance exercises like they were doing.
I've seen the boogie boards. I've seen the balance strap deal like you're walking a tight rope, but it's two inches off the ground. So, I was convinced about the pipe and board.
I went to Home Depot and bought a handle so I could stabilize my grip. I positioned the handle inside of a door jam in the basement and then I positioned the pipe in the middle of the door. It was a double door frame, so plenty of room. Then I positioned the board and put one foot on the side leaning down. Put the other end of the board down. other foot on the other side of the board and promptly fell down after I got up I figured out that I need to hold the handle before I get on this thing so I hold the handle and got on it again it was a fun imbalanced exercise I enjoyed wobbling back and forth and pretending I was skateboarding or surfing very limited space and I was afraid that if I fell a certain way I'd cut my forehead on a filing cabinet or worse bang it on the concrete floor of the basement and then have to be rescued by my wife again.
But I've successfully done this wobbly exercise for a while and I am noticing some tightening and muscles that I wasn't really aware were there for a while. Now I am painfully aware of them.
I love the internet!
+++
I actually look at Pinterest almost every night when I'm at home, but I'm more just mindlessly scrolling and grabbing screenshots of memes that I think would be fun to see in the future when I'm sitting on the couch or wanting to post something but don't know what. Encouraging memes, stuff I can use on postcards, that sort of thing. I also get ideas from Pinterest. I built a rain capture rig that was modeled after something I saw on Pinterest.
But anyways, a few weeks ago some of the fitness guru people that drift through my feeds. They were talking about how squats and horse stance exercises will extend your life. So I now have my phone remind me to squat every couple of hours. Fully clothed, mind you, but squat down and hold that in a resting position for at least 10 seconds, sometimes up to two minutes.
I do horse stances infrequently but when I do them my thighs burn and my body says, what are you doing? Another thing I saw was people balancing on boards that were on wobbly bases. The main wobbly base that I saw was a PVC pipe that was two and a half or three inches wide.
It was almost like they were skateboarding, but there were no wheels. They were just balancing and wobbling back and forth. They claimed that the wobbling imbalance helped them strengthen their core and their lower extremities and improve their balance overall. And that seniors and people close to being seniors could benefit from doing balance exercises like they were doing.
I've seen the boogie boards. I've seen the balance strap deal like you're walking a tight rope, but it's two inches off the ground. So, I was convinced about the pipe and board.
I went to Home Depot and bought a handle so I could stabilize my grip. I positioned the handle inside of a door jam in the basement and then I positioned the pipe in the middle of the door. It was a double door frame, so plenty of room. Then I positioned the board and put one foot on the side leaning down. Put the other end of the board down. other foot on the other side of the board and promptly fell down after I got up I figured out that I need to hold the handle before I get on this thing so I hold the handle and got on it again it was a fun imbalanced exercise I enjoyed wobbling back and forth and pretending I was skateboarding or surfing very limited space and I was afraid that if I fell a certain way I'd cut my forehead on a filing cabinet or worse bang it on the concrete floor of the basement and then have to be rescued by my wife again.
But I've successfully done this wobbly exercise for a while and I am noticing some tightening and muscles that I wasn't really aware were there for a while. Now I am painfully aware of them.
I love the internet!
+++
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