What Made Me Smile This Week (July 22 – 28): I am baaaaack!!!!
Anyone who has ever taken any level of schooling seriously knows one thing: absences stink! Not only do you miss out on the lecture, you still have to do all of the makeup work. Unfortunately, when you’re an adult, there is no one to remind you of that, so you have to learn to kick your own butt sometimes. Well, on that note I hope that this post will be ending my month and a half long hiatus. I am on the fence about publishing my backlog. If you’re interested in reading it, please comment below. But there is something I need to tell you just to get the record straight. No, I wasn’t sick. No, I didn’t run out of things to smile about, and no, I’m not quitting blogging. It was just one of those things where I didn’t publish one week (although I had done the work), then I skipped the next week entirely, and before I knew it, an entire month and a half had gone by with zero blogging activity. Yuck! Complacency is a – cough, cough, cough – I won’t say it in case there are any minors reading this blog. 🙂 I knew I had to get back into it sometime, because I knew that the weeks I did it (and the weeks I was serious about it) made a difference compared to the weeks that I wasn’t. But I also knew that if I was going to do this properly, I had to pick a week that had something important going on. Well, this is it. I’m back in the game, with some (hopefully) interesting updates. Enjoy!
Monday, July 22, 2019
- In an unexpected turn of events, one of my siblings came home for an evening. Dinner was unusually lively as a result (in a good way).
- I finished “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson today. If you like hard science fiction about surviving the end of the earth, this is your book. Few people can match Stephenson’s ability to write fiction that is both suspenseful and informative. Finishing it made me smile both because it is a long book, and because I could bask in time well spent reading it.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
- Movie night tonight (as usual). We saw “The Art of Self-Defense” this time. Understated gallows humor is the order of the day for this film. In retrospect, I don’t think I have ever watched a comedy that made me think this much. Laughter and philosophy?! Sign me up!
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
- The VR headset at work has been on the fritz for a while now. My supervisor asked myself and another volunteer to spend the day trying to fix it. We didn’t get very far, but I definitely made a new friend that day. I hope we meet again sometime.
- I convinced one of my family members to start using the matrix protocol in place of SMS today. I believe the experience on matrix is far superior to any commercially available texting solution right now. I hope to enumerate some of these reasons in an unrelated blog post fairly soon, but suffice it to say I was overjoyed when they agreed to try it. By the way, in case anyone reading this is interested, you can sign up for an account via Riot.im.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
- I was alone today, holding down the house and keeping the dog company. It was uncharacteristically quiet even by my usual standards. The quiet was kind of rejuvenating though.
- I finally got off my rear and did some of the laundry. I’m always happy when I can cajole myself into being productive, so of course it made me smile.
Friday, July 26, 2019
- Today could not have been more different than yesterday. I was off traveling again, and despite the length of the trip I was overjoyed to be out and about once more. It turns out that LACMA Museum has a jazz concert series on Friday evenings, running until the end of August. Though I wasn’t able to stay for the entire concert, it was still the kind of evening that I live for. The air was balmy, I discovered a new stretch of museums to explore along Wilshire Boulevard, and I saw tons of new interesting cityscape.
- Though I got only that night, I was overjoyed that I was able to find a decent route home.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
- I am partially embarrassed to admit that I slept in today, but believe me, I needed it. I know I’m cheating, but I’m still smiling over the events of last night.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
- For the first time in a long time, I got to bed on time tonight and didn’t stay up late. Sleeping without feeling guilty over wasted time on my devices was an absolute dream come true.
What’s worse–absent students, or absent professors? The professor gets a paid day off, nobody learns, and all the profs have to do is– hopefully–come back the next day! If a student misses a day, they can just get the work from someone in the class! Remember our certain poli sci professor who missed, like, five lectures, out of twenty-four? :/ Thats like 4 grand right there. Anyhow, nice entry, Shawn!!
Totally agree! Everybody suffers when they miss class! Good to hear from you. Stay tuned — 2 weeks of posts to catch up on tomorrow. Oy vey…