I completely missed the “holiday” on Tuesday, September 28th. It was “Ask a stupid question day.”
My stupid question, currently, I tend to have a lot of them, is, “WHY is it still over 100 at the end of September?”
What’s your current stupid question? And feel free to have more than one, or come back with more. I’m sure I will.
The first three months we were married the only meals we had more than once were tacos and waffles. Waffles we have ever Sunday, it’s tradition. Tacos we had maybe every other week back then. It was a lot of fun to try out a lot of different recipes.
Since then we’ve fallen into a rut. But it does help us know what day it is. If we’re eating this then it must be this day. We also have the problem that when I ask Brett what he wants for dinner he’ll say one of three things – chicken and rice, chicken and potatoes, or “What are my options?”
We’ve come up with two ways we’re working on that right now. We’ve already been using shared Google calendars so that we can keep track of what we are doing individually and what we are doing together. So we added a new shared calendar called “food” where we can plan out what we’re going to eat in advance. We are still having waffles every Sunday and tacos every Monday (Monday is very firmly tacos and Chuck night, we watch Chuck on DVD during the off season). Brett should probably dice our tomatoes from now on though. He’s a real good dicer, and I tried to slice off the tip of my finger dicing them this week.
We’ve also created a shared Google spreadsheet that lists all the things we’ve cooked, where we got the recipe (especially the specific cook book and page number), what the basic ingredients are, and eventually how we’d rate that meal. We’re slowly building it up, trying to remember what we ate during those first three months so we can list them again. If you have any recipes you love in your home, let me know what they are. We’ll give you credit in our spreadsheet.
So now we decide what we want long before dinner time. And when I ask Brett what he wants for dinner and he replies by asking what his options are, I can tell him to go look at the spreadsheet.
He’s been asking for tator tot casserole pretty much since we created our list. Unfortunately we’d just run out of tator tots right before then, something I’ve had to remind him of each week. We bought more this weekend and that’s what we’ll be having tomorrow. We do need to have potatoes some time soon too. We had one go bad (I hate the smell of rotten potatoes) so I pulled out the good ones and they are on the counter right now. We’ll either put a potato soup on our calendar or we’ll make some mashed potatoes to accompany other things. We both love mashed potatoes and since I’ve learned how to cook them in the pressure cooker (whole potatoes completely cooked in 12 minutes) they are even easier.
In my class students have a choice of two from four possible assignments to do throughout the semester. And I certainly enjoy grading two of them more than I enjoy grading the other two. They’re just more interesting.
The first assignment asks the students to try out the theories of classical and operant conditioning on themselves. They need to pick a behavior, decide if they want to increase it or decrease it, how they will reinforce it, and what stimuli they will add to increase it or subtract to decrease it. Conventional wisdom says it takes three weeks or so to develop a habit. My students are only asked to try it for five days. It is always so interesting to see what they choose and how they try to do it.
For the second assignment they have to list twenty behaviors they do in a single day and then analyze why they did them, what was their motivation, and were they intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to do them.
On my own I’ve had some success with these reflections. I now take a multi-vitamin daily because I changed the stimuli. It is next to my cereal and so when I pull out the cereal I also pull out the vitamin. I used to keep them in the bathroom with the medications. I never took vitamins then. And for the first month I reinforced the behavior by putting a check mark on a chart. Sticker charts do work for adults too.
Both of these assignments relate to my unplugged week last week.
To stop logging in to networks and forums I had to change the stimulus. I removed the “boredom” stimulus and replaced it with my to-do list and printed books to read. The reinforcer was intrinsic. It was real hard the first few days to remove that stimulus. But within the week I no longer felt that pull to constantly be logging in. I guess it really doesn’t take three weeks to create or break a habit. Hooray for behaviorism!
Now I’m in this week. I’ve logged into the forums and networks this week. But I find myself constantly questioning why. Why do I go there so often? Why do I care? What is my motivation? And I’ve decided that as long as I’m asking those questions, or as long as I don’t like the answers, it probably isn’t the best place for me to be. Not that forums and networks are bad places, they do have their place. But I have limited resources, and do I want to be spending them there if I don’t know why?
Some reasons I do like them are for keeping in touch with people. I like that. But I’ve also realized I don’t need to be a constant presence in everyone’s life and they don’t need to be a constant presence in mine. I like them for the support I can find from people around the country, and sometimes even the globe, who have the same interests as me or are going through the same experiences as me. Those are definitely good reasons for on-line interactions and why I will continue to participate.
But if I’m online just to toot my metaphorical horn or to see how many people are paying attention to me, talking to me, looking at me, well, I have better things to do than perform for everyone.
So I will be using the internet as I need it or as I am needed. But those needs must be motivated by something other than simply a need to “see and be seen.”
Today is Elephant Appreciation Day. :lisa:
Here’s me with the elephants I’ve seen in the last year and a bit.
Today is also the Autumnal Equinox (technically it is 3:09am UTC on the 23rd, but that puts it on the 22nd where I’m at), the day with equal amounts of light and dark. So of course it’s completely overcast and has already poured rain once today. But that’s good. We need rain.
At the start of this semester I was getting home before the sun dropped below the horizon. Now it’s dropping about the time I get to my car from the bus. Before the semester is over it will drop soon after I get on the bus. That might be good though. I’ll be less likely to get into an accident because I’m distracted by the absolutely gorgeous sunsets we’ve been having.
Since the leaves don’t really change colors here, here’s some photos I took four years ago of the pretty leaves in Utah – Fall Leaves 2006.
While Brett and I were at the dentist a few weeks ago a woman was participating in a very one-sided conversation with just about anyone she could see. Those types of people fascinate me. Not everyone can carry on a whole conversation by themselves. At one point she started talking about the “historical autobiography” she was writing. I couldn’t help but think she must not understand the meaning of at least one of those words.
At various points in my life I’ve been asked to write autobiographies. During my theater years I wrote several “bios” to be included in the programs for the shows I was in. Those were always kind of fun, particularly because I tended to be in the odd types of shows. For example, my bio for my last show, He Done Her Wrong, a melodrama where I played the town idiot (people were always saying I was type cast in all my shows 😉 ) read like this:
Lisa Giles (Alvina Moneycracker) – I teach children (at Mount Mahogany Elementary School). I do shows (Heidi, Sweeney Todd, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Tony & Tina’s Wedding, Alias Smedley Pewtree). I read books (all sorts, but mostly children’s literature). I sew quilts (it’s relaxing). I like flowers. (I’m like Alvina that way. Note to self: make more time to stop and smell the flowers.) I live. I laugh. I love. Que Vida Boa!
And a bio like that works in a situation like that.
I’ve recently been asked to write another bio. And while this one will also be in a program, it can’t really be like my theater ones. It’s a very different situation. This one will be printed in the Erasmus Circle Scholars Program. It needs to be academic and professional. And it needs to be between 50-60 words. And I’m slightly stumped.
While looking for something else last week I found a print out of this story from when I was teaching elementary school – Mount Mahogany fourth-graders get into movie making. That was a real fun project. I guess I have done some good stuff in my career already. I never really think about that kind of stuff though. It’s just what I do.
On September 17th in 1787, the Constitution of the United States of America was formally adopted by the Constitutional Convention. The individual states then ratified it. Delaware was first on December 7, 1787. Rhode Island was last on May 29, 1790. The Constitution is easily one of the most important documents in the history of the world.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I would love to have a transcript of Elder Oaks’ speech at the Constitution Day Celebration in Salt Lake City, Utah, tonight. The highlights in this article about it are quite good. Elder Dallin H. Oaks: Constitution’s freedoms and principles must be protected.
The courts must limit themselves to interpreting the Constitution and the laws and not stray into the legislative function of law-making. In contrast, we are all aware that in our day the actions of courts on major issues of public policy receive great attention in the media and are frequently represented and understood as the actions of those who make laws rather than those who merely interpret them.
… this reveals a widespread feeling that the courts are revising the moral and cultural life of the nation by making policy determinations that should be made by lawmakers in the elected branches.
… In my opinion, the judicial lawmaking that has been legitimately criticized as judicial activism concerns the interpretation of state and federal constitutions. This kind of judicial action is not reversible by the popularly elected lawmakers and cannot be changed by the sovereign people, except in those unusual circumstances in which a constitutional amendment is feasible. If such judicial action sets aside laws enacted or approved by a direct vote of the people, it offends two fundamentals: separation of powers and popular sovereignty.
This is a country of people. Not of states or governments or judges. But of people.
:computer: Two news articles this past week caught my attention. The first was on the NPR website about how a University declares a week without social media. I don’t do twitter, for various reasons. But I have found myself repeatedly logging in to various forums or social sites throughout the day when I apparently have nothing better to do. Except I always have something better to do. I have a whole list of things I need to be doing.
So this week I decided I’m not logging into any of them. I did log into facebook one evening because I hadn’t heard back through email from someone I’d asked a question of a few days earlier and I wanted to see if they’d been active online. They had been. They just weren’t replying to my email. I haven’t been logging into instant messengers either.
And it’s been interesting what I’ve found to fill my time. I finally started compiling all the emails Brett and I have sent each other since we met. That’s almost five years worth of emails at this point. I’m one month in and already over 40 pages of writing. Compiling all the emails, instant messages, and other notes in to one document to print as a book is a project we’ve been talking about for a while. So now it’s started.
The most interesting thing for me is how often I had to stop myself on Monday, the first day, from just clicking over to the forums when I was bored. That day was hard. By Wednesday it was much easier to instead put together some charts I needed to and to pull up the letter I need to write for the college and get out the Conference edition of the Ensign to finish reading it before the end of the month. I’ve been able to get things done. And it’s been nice, if not a little weird to realize how often I was clicking over.
The second article was in the BBC titled “How to disconnect from your online life.” I particularly enjoyed this quote:
If we can’t live in the moment without tweeting about it, or broadcasting all of our thoughts to our 2,000 Facebook friends, are we in danger of losing our sense of identity?
Brett and I get a sad twisted kick out of the people we know who are tweeting or updating facebook while they are on dates or on their honeymoon or any other place where they should really be in the moment instead of on the internet.
Now, obviously, I haven’t given up all technology this week. I’m still emailing. I’m still blogging. I’m still reading my news headlines (but I have organized a lot of those so I’m not reading all of them every day too). And I will use forums and such as needed after this week. But I’m making an effort to be in the moment and in the flesh more. And I think that’s good to do. I am, after all a real life person in the flesh.
I am an educator and PhD. I quilt, belly dance, run, read, and try to grow things. I am a Mormon. I am infertile. I am a daughter, sister, aunt, grand-daughter, friend, wife, and mom.
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