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“I Thought My Father was God”, edited by Paul Aster, is an amazing book. It’s a compilation of 180 stories from folks who listen to “All Things Considered”, and sent their stories to the National Story Project.

Go out and pick up this book (which is dirt cheap at Amazon and was in the bargain bin and barnes & noble). The stories range in length from one paragraph to 2 pages, and in content from birth to death and all things between. Nearly every story made me thing or laugh, or both. Many of them gave me chills. Some of them made me close the book to just stop and absorb.

If you have an Amazon account, check out the story Revenge, courtesy of their insanely ambitous inside the book project.

It’s also interesting to think about what you would have contributed to the endeavor. If you had one story to share with a stranger, what would it be? Would it be your story, or your grandpa’s? About a great event in your life, or a minor one that made you smile and might make the stranger?

This morning was one of the most hectic I’ve had in a long time at work, coming in the middle of an immense project load. But then I got to the gym for our lunch time workout, and there was baseball on TV.

New baseball, not the ESPN Classic stuff. Grapefruit League, Dodgers vs. Mets. That was the quickest half hour I’ve ever put in on the cross trainer, and this afternoon has been wonderfully calm and relaxed.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh………..

It’s 2815 steps from the door of Jane’s classroom to the chair at my desk.

It’s far easier to start from a template, so I’ll go ahead and do that. In a nutshell, though, I dug high school more or less.
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Housework is a lot like going to the gym. You usually dread doing it, but when you’re done you feel fulfilled and glad to have done it. You also get immediate gratification, clean house at home, sweat at the gym. And in both cases, in a few hours it’ll look just like before as if you had never lifted a finger.

I picked up some of these states on the during our wedding trip to NY and helping Nick move to Cape Cod. OH, KY, CT, ID, and MT are the only states I haven’t at least slept in. I can’t remember if I’ve actually slept in Kansas or Nebraska but the difference between asleep and awake in the plains states is an arbitrary distinction.

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

I’ve been working on a source code migration thing slowly for a few months now. It’s painful and boring and dull. This week is when I’m supposed to be testing it and moving it to production. But like studying for finals in college I’m finding all sorts of semi-legitimate things to do instead. Here’s what I’ve done so far, instead of what I’m supposed to be doing:

• Completely organized our project list
  
• Worked on an oscar voting pool
  
• Attended 6 meetings
  
• Spent 2 hours in hallway conversations (which is about 1:30 over my annual average)
  
• Wrote a perl script to export meeting maker data into a Sidekick (which I don’t own)
  
• Cleaned my desk
  
• Watered my plants
  
• Actually wrote requirements for something
  
• Made this entry
  
• Investigated an alternate source code management solution (which we don’t need)
  
• Spent 3 hours figuring out how to get my Visor to sync with my Mac over IR.
  
• Spent 5 minutes getting up to get the cradle instead
  
• Put together a playlist for the gym
  
• Cleaned out my inbox
  
• Tweaked our project management software
  

Now, nearly all of that list is actually productive, but not a single thing is what I’m really supposed to be doing.

That was one of the hardest earned 283 calories I’ve burned in a long time. I barely have enough energy to lift this pen.

The exit is a long flight of stairs up from the locker room, a cruel joke of the architect. As a test to see if you’re pushing yourself hard enough, it’s a pretty good one.

Checking out of a store yesterday, my total was $9.72. I gave the clerk a $20 and fished out some change, eventually handing him $.77. He gave me back my two pennies. “No”, I said, “I want a nickel back.” He looked at me like a three headed martian, then stared down in his palm as his brain started to melt. He looked back at the register, then his palm, the register again, heaved a big sigh, and finally typed “20.77″ into the machine. I got my $11.05 and left.

I’ve been running this test of math skills for years now, always to my great amusement. Unless you think about it on a grander societal scale, then it’s just sad.

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just flms that I didn’t want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books – everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on earth would my English teacher think that The History of Mr. Polly was better than Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quaity.

– Nick Hornby, “Fever Pitch”