Patience is a skill!

As a child I was prone to the occasional(daily) temper tantrum. I would whine a moan about any thing but particularly if I had to wait for something I really wanted. My mother would always say "patience is a virtue." as if god him self reached down and tapped individuals as patient. I will admit that I have known some truly sanctified patient people in my day. My father was enormously patient when it came to kids. He would always let me make the easy cuts with the torch even though it took 5 times as long and wasted the fuel. A calculus teacher in college would go over the same question no matter how many times you came up with yet another amazingly wrong answer.
In lew of these and many other examples I find that when it comes to my 3 year old we have about the same amount of patience that being none. She is at the constantly whinny stage of life. She has vague ideas about what she thinks should be happening and has started to notice that Mommy and Daddy seldom agree with her. I on the other hand think I know what she is capable of, and get immediately torqued when she fails to meet my assumptions.
But today, today I realized patience can be learned. Come to think of it most of the patient people I know are over 40. But today Addie and I both waited....
and waited...
and waited...
then she gave up, but i persevered and............

Wham, I got a bite! mind you it looked like I was taking the hook out of my hand but there was the proof to Addie that indeed if you sit and wait and watch the fish will bite!

So needless to say she was back at it, and for a 3 year old to sit for nigh on 20 minutes in Moms lap waiting, the universe provided even more positive reinforcement and she caught her very own fish!

All this with no meltdowns, a few tangled lines and a father realizing sometimes you "just have to reel in the line!" Marked the first of what I hope to be many fishing trips. Patience can be taught and today was a great lesson!

J

Running at 30

So I was an athlete in highschool, football and track(I did feild events). So running for me has always been a punishment for something. Late for practice, run. Bad test score, run. And of course the worst part of each school year was running "THE MILE"! I remember vividally sucking wind at the end of the run. Maybe it would be 10 minutes of running and sucking wind then lying down for 5 minutes to "recover". Just last week I ran 3 miles. Not a huge distance but I ran the whole thing, it took about 30 minutes and I was able to come in and cook dinner for the fam. What I have come to realize from all this is A) a mile is just a warm up, and each sequential mile becomes easier, B) I was a lazy kid and really just didn't like breathing heavy, and C) As I get older I get better at pacing myself and listening to my body and what it needs to work.

So running still sucks a little but I"m getting there, and the developement of the 4 pack I'm sporting is good motivation.

A chage of pace...

Hello all,



As you may have notice my blog ha changed names and directions. As some of you may know I am currently in training for the Tri Hawks Triathlon in september. As such I will be documenting the training process as it goes. So here we go...



Training start date: June 10 2009 Wt 240 lbs, average weekly exercise to this point 1 hour



We got home from "vacation" and training started!!!

on uniqueness....

Per a friends post on the popularity of names, specifically your name and how unique it is. I was set off pondering this question, "How unique am I in the big picture?" In other words how many people has there been? Ever?

Fortunately I am not the first to think of or attempt to answer this question. The people at PRB, the Population Reference Bureau, have a fairly interesting, if not greatly speculative estimate.

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

Their tally, 106 BILLION people since the dawn of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. 6.8 billion as of now meaning 5.8% of all humans ever are alive right now... So that's a lot of people. Like you are 0.000000000009% of the total human experience of life on earth. How you feeling now BIG MAN?

But on the up side, our current life expectancy is around 79 or 80 years. For the better part of history, those first 50 or 60 millenniums it was 10. So we are getting "more" life then before, around 29000 days to kick back and soak it up. Also birth rates were through the roof just to survive so most of your time was spent simply trying to get your children to breeding age.

Another great thing to ponder is the idea that, in the words of Jim Morrison, "There will never be another one like you. There will never be another one who will do the things you do..." 106 billion individual life experiences, however short, different in every conceivable way. And also the same in so many ways. 106 billion people born, cared for, raised, falling in love, makin' babies, who are born, cared for, raised, fall in love... You get the idea.

So I guess all this info just makes me feel better about my individuality. It also takes some of the pressure off. We put a premium on our sense of "originality", or 'individuality". We stress over getting it right being unique. "Uniqueness" it seems, comes with being alive and aware in the first place. And even if you totally flop it don't worry your only .000000000009%, you won't drag down the grade too much!

"I just want to be different like all the other Different Kids, I'm still looking for that store at the mall that "ME".

Later J

I wish I had a tail...

Yesterday and today at lunch our conversation curiously turned to the prospect of a human tail.

Colleague 1: I'll have to get my tail removed.
Colleague 2: You have a tail?
Colleague 1: Well not a "real" tail
Colleague 3: Well actually we all have a "tail" bone
Myself I've heard of cases where people do in fact have tails.
Colleague 2: Oh yeah, I think I heard that too!
Myself If you had a tail, what kind of tail would you want???

Anyway this is standard fair at our lunch table as we all attempt to shy away from the business of the day. I like to think that my profound ability to BS and my fairly creative mind aid in our discussions taking, while sometimes odd, very interesting detours.

Well to answer my own question, which i did in the course of the conversation,
I would like a long prehensile tail. A South American sail as one colleague pointed out. It would be most use full in making sculpture to have that one extra hand like appendage. However the golden retriever tail is a close second as it is as useful for expressing emotions as the human face and does not require someone to make eye contact to do so. I mean if you see me from behind and your coming up you'll know if you want to interrupt me or steer clear by a simple glance at my posterior appendage.

So there it is,
What kind of tail would you want to have?

JR

We are the Champions!!!

Well it was a hard one purple T-shirt, but, the Faculty Basketball team pulled out the win in the final round of the tournament tonight! This was the third time we met this team as it was a double elimination tourny. Tonight was it one of us had to win it all, and Brains and wisdom did infact out class youth and vigor! 23 to 11!!! Needless to say the Faculty took no pleasure in the win and certainly did not imply that the students were weak or un worthy of our presense....

Well actually "WE WIN YOU LOOSE< NANNER NANNER!!!"

I love it!

Homeward bound!

As most of you know My wife left me...For the week and went to spend some much needed time with friends. This left me alone with Addie and my Mom for a week. I must say I missed her very much. I would get 2 or 3 calls a day, but I really don't like to talk on the phone with someone I miss, it just makes it worse. On the upside my Mother took care of Addie and I was able to work in my art studio for a solid week with little distraction and was able to complete a new outdoor sculpture in a little under 2 weeks, a new personal best!

As the week went on I started to realize how much i depended on Chrissy. Not for the cooking(LOL) or her domestic mastery, or for keepng track of all the things i misplace... But for her conversation. As I said I didn't have much to say on the phone, and honestly I like the long chat when you get back together about all the things that happened while you were apart. But I realized she is an integral part of my thinking and doing process, she sits and glazes over and absorbes my mindless rambelings and in doing so helps me figure out what to do, and for this I am eternally grateful.

So at last she is coming home, should be there when I get home from work and that is a very good thing, I think, we'll need to discuss it!