Unpredictably consistent ~

I am one of the most consistent people that I know. When I can I find routines I stick to them.

When I was working shift work that was a challenge because my shifts were all over the place for the first half of my career and then the second half of my career they became a little more predictable but still shift work. So I would come up with ways to bring consistency to that inconsistent schedule. I picked days off that nobody else really wanted, Sunday/Monday. That way I could go to church consistently and I would have a day off that many people did not have where I could actually get things done and relax all on the same day.

My shift work was normally two or three evening shifts that started around one o 'clock and ended around 9 or 10 then two or three day shifts that started at 6 30 in the morning and ended around 2 30 in the afternoon. They would change from here to there. When I would get a 10 to 6 I would be thrilled because that meant I could sleep in a little bit and then miss all the traffic on the way home. My wife didn't really like the 10 to 6 but that was my favorite shift because I showed up and everything was already hopping, then I left while everything was so still rocking and rolling, but I had set things up so that they could survive and do their thing without me. It was a good shift.

If I could have worked straight ten to sixes I would have. But my consistency extends beyond just my shifts. When I'm confronted with wrong, I tend to get away from it. I tend to call it out also. I remember after my mother's knee surgery, her recovery went very poorly and at one point my wife and I were looking forward to just an afternoon break when my brother and his wife came down to see my mom.

When they got there, everybody said hello to mom. My wife and I got ready to walk out the door and my mom announced that we were having a meeting to discuss her future. Then she asked me for my advice.

Up until that point, she had not listened to my advice and said she felt like a teenager rebelling against an authority figure in me. All I was doing was trying to help. So she gave a preamble and then she said, "So what advice do you have for me, David?"

And I told her "I have none because you haven't listened to my advice up until this point. I'm not advising you to do anything." I said it in a very emotional way and it was not accepted very well.

I get that way at church when I'm confronted with things that I fully disagree with. I tend not to go along just to get along. And when people ignore me and treat me like I'm less than them, I respond in kind.

Unpredictable, because a lot of people don't expect that, but I was raised to be an adult and to make my own decisions, and I do. It's interesting to be unpredictably consistent. Most people don't expect somebody to actually do what they say they will do.

Most people don't even expect you to show up. More and more what I'm reading online from management gurus is most of being successful is just showing up, which I do very consistently. I can't help it if I'm rejected because other people are projecting images onto my canvas that are not me or they're looking at me and expecting something but they never express that expectation.

They just turn away when they don't get what they wanted or expected. But I continue to be me, unpredictably consistent.

Fear of pickpockets ~

When my wife and I went on a Mediterranean cruise I had some memories dredged up on the excursions.

My father had spent 20 years in the Air Force. During his time in the military he travelled to foreign countries and did lots of amazing things. And he experienced some of the bad things out there. He never said he had his pockets picked but as I got older he would always warn me about pick pockets.

As a teenager I got my driver's license at 16. This meant I carried my wallet with me every day in case I got to drive. Both my mother and my father repeatedly warned me about the dangers of pick-pockets and how carrying my wallet in my back pocket like so many people do was just an invitation to have my wallet stolen. They even encouraged me to carry my wallet in my front pants pocket so if someone tried to steal my wallet I'd feel them doing it!

All of this talk about pick-pockets instilled a deep fear of losing my wallet in me. To this day I carry a smaller wallet and keep it in my front pants pocket, though recently I've started wearing a fanny pack again and I tend to put my wallet in it.

Fast forward to our cruise. Each of our tour gudes warned that it was "pick pocket season" and they encouraged us to secure our wallets and passports from pick-pockets. They even strongly suggested that if we were carrying a backpack that we should carry it in front of our body so that no one could steal stuff out of the backpack without us seeing them trying.

While I'm glad that I am prepared for this sort of thing it still dredged up that old fear that my parents instilled in me.

Weird.

Augmented reality for years ~

I've augmented my reality for years. When I was younger I got a radio
from my grandmother. It was a white stand-up clock radio that was an
analog clock and you can set the alarm on it when I was restricted to
my bedroom in the fourth grade or fifth grade that's the radio that I
listened to Chicken-man and Paul Harvey on.

As I got older I'd buy boom boxes. I remember I bought this big silver
boom box that was awesome. I would listen to the radio on it and I'd
listen to my cassettes on it. When I got home from school I would put
it on the table and listen and actually fall asleep with my head on
the table.

Then came the Walkman radios with the headphones. I loved them but I
hated the spongy foam on my ears. I was so happy when they came with
those plastic stick in the ear so that they didn't fill the ear but
you could still hear the music really well headphones. Then came the
waterproof versions. I didn't use them very much because they were
always too expensive.

But I've augmented my reality with music and then as technology has
progressed with Bluetooth whisperings in my ear from podcasts and my
own little programs that quoted facts and jokes and weather
information randomly.

I'm concerned about visual augmentation because it could be very
distracting. But I'm also rather excited about it. The idea of being
able to go to the aquarium and have on a pair of AR glasses and see
the name and type of each fish and shark swimming in the water just
excites me to no end.

The possibilities of being able to see bubbles over cars as I drive
down the road giving me information about what they're about to do or
their speed or even the rating of the driver if we can get that far
without too much invasion of privacy are exciting.

Being able to drive by a business and see that a restaurant's busy and
the wait times two hours would be amazing.

I'm excited about what augmented reality is becoming but don't be
mistaken that it's new, it's not.

Four Tendencies ~

I listened to Gretchen Rubin's book, The Four Tendencies, again. In it she proposes that there are four tendencies and personalities that humans have that drive our decision -making in our actions. It's not quite the personality quizzes that pigeonhole everybody into boxes that tend to limit us, but they're just tendencies that we have.

I was reminded that I fit the upholder tendency really well. I have strong tendencies in that direction. I'm a rebel too, and that twists me up inside at times. But the chapter on upholders really resonated with me. (ooo, touchy feely words :-)

So many of the things that she said upholders tend to do or act like fit me to a T. Inner and outer expectations, love to do lists and checking things off, can come off as rigid or distant. React badly when situations change unexpectedly.

It's funny because there was this meme going around several times asking the question "what would your warning label be?" And my answer every time I see that is "Volatile when shaken". Because I don't like things being shaken up unless I'm the one shaking.

It was fun to listen to the book again. I got a lot more out of it this time. I'm hoping to learn more about myself and others and hopefully fit into the world a little bit better and understand people better.

Check it out at
https://www.amazon.com/Four-Tendencies-Indispensable-Personality-Profiles-ebook/dp/B01MU23P0N/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Q21IKVXC9JLQ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7W6u-PZ6t69JymWKsydRDeRG2xV3pX_jnPncnx60AsqA36r2uTKClNhjLzi4Wux9r9viJj5om8mZu_Y_wfLK579ziKvppW9r7gUKCH3rXZjl2le0gQEOn6ZCRZn8WypqKIVaR4KEFvRco8eeN-ocCiJQqNiEmhQmK91U3lqdg7pu-34WLTVtEzFB5hGQrVjjYDbEp4ZoJoKXj_2X-kHP2xWU8u74n5GxsAo37dhEgSU.LJSd91Gyh5J-MvV_DpRhT6jbB8KqqOkvtwZjhELRJng&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+four+tendencies+by+gretchen+rubin+book&qid=1711630653&sprefix=four+tend%2Caps%2C127&sr=8-1

Load of wood from neighbor ~

I recently got a load of free wood from a neighbor. He took the tree down himslef and cut it into short lengths. My wife talked to him while she was walking the dog and told me he had said we could have as much of the wood as we wanted.

I didn't do anything about it until I finally met the guy. Super nice widower that moved down from the northeast to be close to his kids and grandkids, he's one of those guys that does all that outdoor stuff well. He told me to take as much as I liked.

I took the truck over there and loaded up the bed with a bunch of wood. I took a lot of the fire-ready pieces but also took a lot of the bigger unsplit pieces so I'd have some work to do myself.

It was nice doing some manual work like that. I didn't break anything on the truck and I didn't hurt myself. It was a good workout, to the point that I was sore for a couple of days afterwards. And I stacked the wood in the back corner so it can "season" before I try to split any.

Every time I hear or think the word "season" in association with firewood I wonder what they put on it, salt and pepper or what? LOL

Anyways, it's nice to have a nice neighbor. Hopefully I can be nice too...

Growing sprouts ~

A little while back I started seeing a couple of videos on YouTube about growing sprouts and a jar. I thought it was a silly idea but I gave it a try with some broccoli seeds that I had.

I had grown the broccoli seeds or other broccoli seeds in a little pan of dirt and harvested the sprouts from that after about 10 days and that was fun. I added to my morning eggs but just throwing them in a jar and rinsing them twice a day just didn't sound like it would work.

The first try failed. I used broccoli seeds that were supposed to go in the dirt. Apparently there are differences between dirt seeds and sprouting seeds. I still haven't figured out exactly what the differences are but I'm learning.

I bought some alfalfa sprouting seeds off of Amazon and tried them. I put two teaspoons or tablespoons in a mason jar and did the little straining thing and kept them upside down so they would drain after I rinsed them.

I had way too many sprouts in that jar. They tasted good but the last bits were slimy and not good. I cut it back to one tablespoon in a mason jar and that actually did a lot better. After a few rounds of doing that I ordered some broccoli sprouting seeds and the first batch of that was very small.

Apparently I need two tablespoons of broccoli seeds where one tablespoon of alfalfa seeds worked just fine. So now I'm at a point where I have three jars going and I ate sprouts in my eggs this morning.

My goal with this is to have nutrient rich foods added into my diet with very little work. I could buy them but it's satisfying to actually grow some for myself and it fits with what I'm trying to learn because I've tried to grow vegetables on the deck for two or three years.

I get a few but it's just not enough to sustain. So far my conclusion is that I need a lot more going to sustain even just one person let alone two people having a salad a couple of times a week. I had a friend at work that started a whole business based on growing lettuce using hydroponics and then keeping fish in the water so that they would poop and add to the nutrients in the water to help the lettuce grow.

He and his family built an entire building and set up a whole hydroponic system and he did that going into retirement. It was always fun to think about but I don't know that I could ever scale up to that level.

But I am thinking about scaling up my hydroponics to where I'm doing it outside on the deck using rain gutters or something else. It's a fun little project and it gives me something to work on and think about and then eat.

Professor of life ~

The other day a passerby referred to me as "professor". I was sitting outside of a hospital enjoying the the warm spring sunshine on a clear, cool, low pollen day. While sitting out there I was listening to a summary about a book and was using pen and index cards to draw the words of the main points of the book as I listened. I was dressed in blue jeans and a button-down Oxford-style green-checked shirt with another pen and a voice recorder in my shirt pocket. I had a bottle of green tea beside me on the rock wall I was sitting on.

I liked the moniker "professor". Even though the guy that called me that was just passing by and looked like a male nurse on a short break from duties in the hospital showing that he was paying attention as he strolled purposefully on the sidewalk it still felt good.

Who knows? I may put it on my business card or resume and that say that I am a professor of life as I learn more and more.