Leonardo and Any Ideas for Collaboration?

I am currently reading the biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. What I really find interesting about Leonardo is how much he collaborated with others and how much he sought out knowledge from others to bolster his own knowledge gained through astute observation. We tend to think of Leonardo as this divinely inspired genius who just had this innate talent for learning everything and being a master at anything he tried. He certainly was a genius, and he had incredible God-given talents. However, he sought out knowledge, he sought to quench an inexhaustible curiosity by studying the works of others, directly interviewing craftsmen and other artists, and through direct collaboration with other people many of whom knew quite a bit more than he in their respective fields. Apparently Leonardo wasn't all that great at math, especially algebra and trigonometry. (Granted Europeans generally didn't know much about trigonometry in Leonardo's time.) He failed to teach himself Latin. Duolingo wasn't widely available then either. He did, however, possess a gift for greatly raising the bar when building upon the works of others.

I was really struck by the story of the Vitruvian Man drawing. You know the one: muscular naked guy circumscribed by a circle and boxed in by a perfect square demonstrating the proportions of the human body. A little aside: it's likely that Leonardo was his own model for this, and muscular naked guy is a beardless, fit Leonardo. Or at least a close likeness. Vitruvius was a first century Roman general and architect who in describing how to build buildings said that the Romans should use human proportions as ratios for how wide and tall and deep things should be. Then he laid out what those proportions should be. Things like a man's armspan is the same as his height and his foot is exactly one-sixth of his height. Leonardo and his amigos began talking about this when they were coming up with diagrams for a church, and they all took a swing at drawing Vitruvian man. Leonardo's made the others look like grade schoolers' by comparison. It was the collaboration that struck me, though. One of his other compadres put the circle offset from the square, which is something Leonardo then copied. Isaacson also wrote the biography of Steve Jobs and said that collaboration was the reason that Jobs had open areas built into the offices at Apple.

I thought about that in relation to the virtual workspace we are in now. One thing I really missed about going into the office during the pandemic was the conversation that was had outside of meetings. I missed overhearing a couple colleagues talking about some proposed solution and either being able to contribute myself or just listen in to follow some new train of thought. I missed ad hoc whiteboarding in the hallways of proposed solutions. Reading about Leonardo and how he learned and evolved his ideas with input from so many different people reminded me of this excellent keynote given by Jessica Kerr on symmathesy. Interestingly it was also focused on Florentines, just about a century after Leonardo was doing his thing.

What are we doing or what can be done to bring great minds (or even good or average minds) together to collaborate like this in today's age of working remotely from home? Why do we get enraged that Elon Musk wants his workforce back in the office? My money says Steve Jobs would have done the same thing. Don't get me wrong! I am a big proponent of working from the beach! How do we get that same collaboration without requiring everyone to be in office, though?

A Thank You Note

It's that time of year where we take a moment and think on those things for which we are grateful. It has been a challenging year for me, but I realize especially in the past several weeks that I have so much to be thankful for. So I thought I'd get my gratefulness written out.'

First and foremost I am thankful for my family. My mother and brother Rob have been here through what has been the darkest time of my life. I really appreciate Rob giving me a place to stay through this as well as balancing that line of letting me rest and heal on one hand and getting my butt out of bed to work or go to the gym rather than wallowing all day on the other. Of course my whole family has been there for me and I feel the love and support from everyone including Jen's family. Our trip to Daytona with them has to be a highlight of this year. If there has been a silver lining to any of this, it has been that it helped me reconnect with my youngest brother Billy that I really needed.

Of course my closest family is Jen and the boys, and they are key to me getting better as well. The boys have grown into fine men, and I really appreciate the way they've made time in the past year to be with us on vacation, but also the times they have even just dropped by the house. And what can I say about Jen? "In good times and bad.. In sickness and health," has really been pushed to the extreme this year. I'm looking forward to getting back home and starting the rest of my life with her.

I am grateful for all my wonderful friends. My social network collapsed with my promotion to manager and then the pandemic. The pandemic has been so difficult on the social networks for so many of us. I felt very lonely and isolated at times. I have had so many great friends reach out lately, some of which I haven't spoken to in so long. I want my friends to all know that I love them regardless of how frequently or infrequently we talk. I want them also to know that I am here for them as well. I want to promise to always be there, though I know I need to rebuild trust in my promises. 

Acquaintances. A special shout out of gratitude to everyone who reached out some of whom I barely know and many whom I've never met in "real life". I savor every note of encouragement. Seriously, even the smallest, "Hang in there," is so appreciated. A special note to the Firehouse community: I am so grateful I get to be associated with you all. When I say that I need to rebuild my social network I am looking straight at you and can't wait to attend some fun events in 2023. 

I am grateful for AA, especially the Lily Gulch group down here in Littleton. I think if you are an alcoholic trying to recover, you need a community. It is simply too much to rely on oneself or even one other person. It really helps to surround oneself with many people who will support one's sobriety. It also helps to know that at almost any time there is a room of people somewhere who will be there to support my sobriety without judgement.

Following on that, I am thankful that I have a Higher Power. Though I am merely human and do not understand my own purpose yet, I have faith that human life is purposeful because there is some greater Good. With a sober mind and mindful intent, I am optimistic that I will find my purpose. 

I am grateful I have a therapist who relates to me and offers sound advice. Whether I take that advice or not is totally on me! We're making progress. It may be ten steps forward before alcohol sends me nine back, but it's progress. (And I do realize it isn't alcohol that is the problem, but it is my choosing to drink the alcohol that is the problem!) I also appreciated my group therapy group. I am sure you have heard the saying "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." My IOP group epitomized that saying. There were folks from their early twenties to their late 70s. There were manual laborers, those of us tech professionals, and a heart-breaking number of nurses. I cannot over-emphasize the devastation on people's mental health that the pandemic policies that isolated us have had. I have so much appreciation for the mental health professionals out there working to repair us!

I have to give gratitude for my little dog, though he would probably prefer shredded chicken. I will never get to hold my own child, but when I think on how much I love Buck and how happy he can make me, I begin to understand how parents must love their children. He's just a dog. I can only imagine how a child who had the best parts of both Jen and I would capture my heart. How Buck anchors me in this world, though, is something I  cannot express without people realizing I am completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I have to give a mention for William Butler Fish, who is doing great having me close by so much of the time, and to the chickens who made me breakfast over the past year, God rest their little chicken souls.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

On Failure

I wrote a long journal entry yesterday about my feelings being laid off from Nordstrom. It was fueled by a LinkedIn post related to the mass tech layoffs that occurred recently particularly the ones by Twitter and Meta, in which the author said, If you've been laid-off, realize that is a failure of the company you were working for, not you. It made me think of Robin Williams as the therapist in "Good Will Hunting" telling Will, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." I must have watched that clip two-dozen times in the days following being laid off in an effort to make myself believe it wasn't my fault the way things ended there. I am just beginning now to really believe that.

Without going into the details I did in the blog post, I am realizing that what led me to being let go after almost seven years of doing the best I could do in that job, was not my fault at all. If you know me at all, you know I read a lot. (My brother argues that listening to audiobooks shouldn't count towards my book count, but he's wrong.) I read everything I can get my hands on including a lot of managerial-type books, and I had realized before that what was going on within my organization at Nordstrom contradicted so much of what I read, even those books that my vice president herself had given us to read. You can't tout radical candor, which according to the author of Radical Candor, Kim Scott, is equal parts "Challenge Directly" and "Care Personally", if you avoid any sort of direct challenge and do not care personally for those you support. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink lays out the three elements of drive, of personal motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If you give your subordinates no autonomy, no chance at any sort of mastery in their work, and provide no vision, no purpose for the work is it any wonder that they might feel disengaged from that work?

When I was let go I initially felt like the biggest failure. My self-esteem was already not good and had been further ground down by months of doing all I could to keep projects on track and keep improving while my team was slashed in half and never receiving any sort of encouragement from my superiors. I also did not have the tools for self-compassion and was not using the tools I had learned previously to help deal with the situation. That was a tough lesson for me and one I will not need to learn again.

Some company is going to give me that shot, is going to give me that autonomy, allow me opportunities and encourage me to master my skills, and provide a clear purpose for the work we do. And I'm going to do incredible things for that company and for the team I get to work with.

Mindfulness

I mentioned mindfulness in an earlier post. I truly believe that mindfulness is key to my mental health. Mindfulness is not just a key practice in my spirituality but also in the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) that I am working on.

So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is very simply the practice of being fully present in the present moment. You may have heard the saying that depression arises from worrying about the past and anxiety arises from worrying about the future. If you suffer from either or both of these then you probably know the relief you feel when you are so engaged in some activity that your mind must focus on the present, and for even a moment you are given a reprieve from thinking about your past or future. For me, when I play basketball, which I used to do a lot more than I currently do, I get so focused on the game and what I am doing that I forget about everything else. Nowadays a really good book can also give me that bit of escape from my own worries.

Most of the time, however, we do not usually have the sort of time to escape from life either through a good book or a basketball game. We have things we need to get done, life events and obligations that must be addressed. So how can we stay grounded in the present moment so that we do not become overwhelmed by thoughts about the past and future? I will put forth a few practices that I use and that you might try. 

The most basic mindfulness practice that is taught and is always available is paying attention to your own breath. Paying attention to your breath does not mean changing how you are breathing, but simply recognizing each breath that you take. Feeling each breath come into your body and then as it leaves your body. You might focus on a place in your body where you feel that breath, as it passes your nostrils or as it fills your chest. There is no need to count the breaths. Just take a moment to close your eyes and pay attention to your breath. Feel each one arise, feel it enter your body, and feel it leave your body. Do this for one minute.

Once you are practiced at paying attention to your breath like this for a minute or more, you might look into meditation. A simple meditation is simply being in a comfortable position and paying attention to your breath as you just did. You need not worry about "emptying your mind" or "thinking about nothing". Thoughts will arise, but when your focus is on your next breath, they will quickly and quietly fade into the background.

There is another skill I use that does involve changing up how you are breathing. With this one I concentrate on inhaling for four counts and exhaling for six counts. It feels slightly uncomfortable to exhale for longer than I inhale and takes a bit of effort, that extra bit of focus that keeps me grounded in the present moment. A minute or two of this is usually enough for those negative thoughts that I had been thinking to fade into the background.

Another activity I like to use is to give my brain a challenging task. Perhaps it is multiplying two three-digit numbers in my head. I really like those mindfulness coloring books, the ones with mandalas or animals or scenery made up of little geometric shapes. I use my left hand, which is my off hand, to color in the shapes. It takes concentration. Another thing you might try if you do not have a coloring book in front of you but have some other printed material at hand is to fill in all the o's and g's and parts of other letters where a space is enclosed by the letter.

One final skill that helps me focus and is quite relaxing is to do muscle relaxation. Starting with my feet I tense up muscles for several counts and then allow them to relax. Once I have moved all the way up to my head I feel more grounded and relatively more relaxed. You begin this by scrunching up your toes and holding it for several seconds and then allow those muscles to relax. Then try and tense your calf muscles and allow those to relax. Then your thighs, your butt, your abdomen, your hands, biceps, shoulders, neck, mouth (smile really big and then relax!), and finally scrunch up your forehead and let that relax.

Each of these skills is usually readily available and can bring you back to the present moment when worry, either about the future or the past, begins to creep up.

Make Your Bed and Don't Ring the Bell

I am really, really sad, and no it doesn't have anything to do with election day. It is still 3pm local time as I'm writing this, and polls aren't closed on the east coast even yet. I'm mourning some things. I began reading, well, listening to, Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. I'm not too far in, but I'm assuming it recounts the year of her life after the death of her beloved husband. In it I recognize my own grief and that I too am in mourning.

I'm in mourning for a life that I never really had, though. I'm in mourning for the way things might have been. The best friend I might have had. The perfect marriage I might be enjoying. The purposeful job that would make me spring from my bed. Joan Didion had a husband she loved, a sort of shred career she loved, a child who lost her father. Lots to mourn. Ashes she could bury. Memories she would savor the rest of her life. I have memories I want to erase.

I will not be mourning for the person I was, though I would take a whole lot of joy in cremating and burying him. I hate that person. Maybe that is why I have so much shame. Because even as I loathed that person I continued to let him live inside of me. Why do I have this hatred of who I was only last week? I'm not sure I even came upon the realization until the past couple days, but I am finding out why now. That former me lived with no core values.

Core beliefs and core values. "Core" means they are at the heart of something; they are at the heart of our thoughts and behaviors. A video we watched in IOP described our core beliefs as the lens through which we see the world. If you see the world as a generally safe place, you will greet the stranger walking toward you on an empty street. If you see the world as a dangerous place, you may cross the street. Core beliefs aren't necessarily positive. I see myself as an intelligent and compassionate person. I also believe myself to be a lying, selfish, perfectionist imposter who has a ton of God-given talent and yet makes no positive impact on the world. Core beliefs can be pretty rough.

Then yesterday in IOP we began an examination of our core values. Now, core values are generally positive, but it doesn't mean we always live up to our own values. Our therapist played the following video for us. You may have seen it as it is from 2014 and made quite a stir for a bit. https://youtu.be/yaQZFhrW0fU I'd love for you to take the time now to watch it if you have the time. It's about twenty minutes long. Please check it out later if you haven't time now and haven't already seen it.

I had heard about the speech before and had always meant to go watch it just on the line "Make Your Bed". Jen always insists on making the bed. I hardly ever did it if left to my devices, though I understood the lesson. Take care of the little things. Then worry about the bigger things. Plus it being the first task of the day, it gets the ball rolling on the rest of the day. I feel like the author of Atomic Habits must have talked about the speech. I'll come back to Atomic Habits at some point. What I wasn't ready for were the other nine lessons in the speech.

The second lesson is to find someone to help you paddle. I guess it really shouldn't be summarized as find someONE to help you paddle. You need a team. This world is too much for just two people in a boat. You need a team. I hadn't put together a team to help me. 

There are a couple lessons in there about overcoming failure with determination that reminded me of No Mud, No Lotus and embracing suffering. I wonder if Buddhists make it through SEAL training at a greater rate than other religions. I wonder if any Buddhists actually go to SEAL training. Thought: Do Buddhists make the best warriors? I can still make myself laugh even now.

The sixth lesson is about taking risks to achieve something meaningful. I am not generally a risk-taker. Sober me isn't anyway. Like I said, I believe I need to be perfect; therefore, I don't extend myself like I believe I should. I don't put my neck too much on the line. I try to avoid getting anyone upset with me. So I hide. I do not let people get in touch with the real me in case they do not like the real me too much. I hide my thoughts and actions that others might get upset about. Thus a perfectionist, lying, phony. And at this point watching the video I feel like this speaker is taking dead aim at me.

Seventh lesson - deal with the sharks and don't run away from them. (By the way, my brother and I just watched a segment on sharks. They don't circle you. You won't know a shark is there until you are being attacked. Then punch it in the nose!) If you all only knew how much the shark imagery reverberated with me. "He is speaking to me!" I might have been wearing my shark socks or boxers! (I was wearing duck boxers, but still...) I wish I had dealt with the sharks at Nordstrom better. I let them run me off. Would it have been worth being fired over rather than laid off? I don't know. I feel bad for the good people left though out there swimming as the sharks circle...

Eighth lesson - Be your best at the darkest moments. At this point in group therapy I have tears starting. Also realize I am in a room of 20 and 30 - somethings. Men my age with my problems don't go to group therapy unless it is court-ordered. (Btw, mine is NOT. I'm just weird.) Many, many men with my problems don't make it to be my age or just give in to the bottle and divorce and drugs. Anyway, so now this naval officer is admonishing me that I need to be my best at the darkest times, and all I can think of is how when things got bad I gave up. That old me did not have any sort of personal values that kept him going for him.

Ninth - the power of hope and singing when you are up to your neck in mud. I have to admit that even now I have very, very little hope of anything. I honestly cannot let myself look too far ahead. I am trying to deal with the right here and now. If I were looking ahead I would not be publishing these thoughts to a public forum. I do not have a job yet and who wants a perfectionist, lying phony? My only choice is going to be to run for public office at some point. I am right up to my fucking neck in mud and it is hours and hours before dawn. And the only songs that come to my mind are the horribly sad songs.

And when he got to the last lesson: Never, ever ring the bell, I fucking lost it and left the room. We talk today about being triggered and on one side of society's ideological fence it gets a ton of importance and on the other side talk of people being triggered is dismissed with words like "snowflake". I understand now being triggered. I don't remember much about my suicide attempt, but the images I do have in my head are horrifying. Like being in an actual horror movie that you cannot escape from. At the same time, I have learned some skills to cope with emotional distress. Go to the rest room, do some deep breathing, throw some cold water on your face. We don't need "safe spaces for snowflakes"; we need to teach our young people coping skills. But still today I have had that line in my head all day, "Never, ever ring the bell." 

Never, ever ring that fucking bell. Stick to your values, and Do Not Give Up! I am begging you: Whatever it is that you are thinking about, if it is important to you, do not give up on it.

Trying to Sleep in a Muddy Foxhole

I went to bed last night wishing I could just get in a time machine and go back several weeks. That's progress. For the preceding three weeks I either didn't sleep or went to sleep hoping I wouldn't wake up in the morning. Right now I know it will be difficult for me to sleep tonight. I am feeling an awful lot like I hope I don't wake up in the morning right now. I am also trying to remain mindful, though, to focus on this very moment and each successive moment and not worry about either the future or the past.

I am reading No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh. He was a Buddhist monk. I highly recommend reading anything by him. The premise of this book is embracing suffering, as that leads to happiness. Just as a lotus cannot grow on a marble slab, we need mud in our lives, ie. suffering, in order to experience happiness. The key is mindfulness, being in touch with this very moment and examining it without judgement. What we are learning in my Intensive Outpaitent program is very similar - being mindful, examining how we feel without judgement. I plan on writing more about mindfulness in the next few days.

I had told my therapist before that Alcoholics Anonymous is not my kind of religion, but as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. And, brother, there are bullets whizzing by me in the form of cravings for alcohol. So tonight was my second night in a row of AA. If you want to stop drinking, it's a great place to start. For my alcoholic friends who kicked it without the help of AA, I would also encourage you to attend at least one meeting. You may find there is someone there like me who really could be inspired by you and your story. It helped me yesterday and tonight to hear people's stories, to see people, young and old, a lot like me, relatively normal folk who just have no mastery over alcohol. It also hurts me a bit to see people getting their six-month chips knowing I had done almost seven months before I blew it all up. Those people were all on day 5 at one time though too. I have been on day five Lord knows how many times! One day at a time. One moment at a time.

Check on Your Managers! We are Not Okay!

In dealing with my current issues I have had to turn to my social support system, the friends and family who love me and care about me. I can barely get out of bed in the morning let alone schedule doctor's appointments and job interviews and get myself to therapy. I've been really encouraged, though, by the people who have reached out, and I want to turn a sad story into a success story.

As I think I this support system what stands out is how much I have isolated myself over the past several years. It certainly is no coincidence that this corresponds to the Covid pandemic and working from home. However, I think it began even earlier when I moved into a management role. I feel like the manager role can intrinsically be a lonely one if measures are not taken. As I said in an earlier post, I believe the measures are there in work I have already done in therapy and in DBT, but they can be easily forgotten if not regularly practiced. I intend to write more here about those DBT skills and how they relate to work in order to do my own practice of them and maybe to help some others out there.

I was thinking on how I have not made new friends in several years. When I was out drinking and carousing with my engineering peers, it was easier to get past my own social anxiety, have fun, and make friends. Some of those friendships even stuck. When I moved into a management role, though, I certainly was not going to do any carousing, and I really limited how much drinking I would do, already knowing my propensity to overindulge at times. I did not want anyone I supported to see me inebriated. It became even more difficult when I gave up drinking as I could not get past the social anxiety enough to open up to people. 

Now I know all other managers out there are not depressive alcoholics with severe social anxiety, but I do believe that in that manager role you have fewer work peers and those peers you do have are incredibly busy. I think back on the halcyon days of playing foosball or ping-pong at work! Now, no one has that kind of time anymore even when we were still all in the office. I regret now not reaching out to my manager peers at Nordstrom socially more.

I will also say, it was nice, especially in an environment where I was getting no feedback back from my boss, to hear from someone I was supporting as a manager, "Hey, I know it can be a rough job, but I think you're doing a great job." My team and those people I worked with every day - those are the people who knew what kind of job I did and that feedback was very motivating, inspiring. 

So, today's lesson is if your manager is doing a good job, let them know it. It can otherwise be a very thankless job at times. Despite the provocative title, your manager is probably really okay but will appreciate it nonetheless.

Seen Better Days

**** Trigger Warning for Suicidal Ideation ****

I'm back. It's been a bit of a long layoff for me from writing. I want to dive right back in, and I really want to make better use of my blogs and hopefully get to some interesting things, but for the moment, I need to get this out of the way so that you all have some context of where I am.

When we last talked I was probably still gainfully employed by Nordstrom. Apparently more for my gain than for theirs because I was let go the day after Florida got clobbered with Hurricane Ian. I think that maybe I will expand on that a bit further later. In fact, I believe I already have something written out that I was waiting to post. Technically, my last day is November first, and I would rather not jeopardize the last few days I have on the payroll.

So, being in a hurricane (okay, technically it was just a tropical storm at that point when it passed directly over Cape Canaveral with its 60mph+ sustained winds) was one of the least exciting things to happen in the past month. I created a little tempest of my very own. Looking back now I can say that I lost track of the things that are really important and forgot a lot of the therapy that had helped me so much over the previous two years. I only saw myself.

I would love to apologize to each and every person that I know and especially the ones I have hurt. Having a major depressive disorder and being an alcoholic are not things that people should need to apologize for any more than people getting cancer. However, even people with cancer can, and do, make hurtful decisions to others and for those decisions I consciously and willfully made that hurt others, I will apologize for and make amends.

First of all, I am safe now. As safe as anyone else who needs to drive the streets and highways of the Denver metro area. Secondly, I had another suicide attempt. I won't go into details now. Was it serious? I didn't hurl myself in front of a train, but I wanted to die. I was frustrated at just how difficult it was. I was also very, very drunk.

There was a jug of wine in our outside refrigerator that had been there for a very long time. Several years I think. I had been eyeing it. I knew, I knew, I knew, that if I tapped into that in the time that I did with Jen out of town and feeling the way that I did about my life, there would be a very good chance that I would not come out of it alive. And then I poured myself a drink from it.

To be frank, I wanted people at Nordstrom who had made the decision to let me go to hurt. That's why I did what I did. There are other factors that made me not happy with life, primarily generalized depression. I want to apologize to those people at Nordstrom, but again, I'm not going to apologize for being sick. There were things before that I wish had gone different and I apologize for not speaking up about that. I hope, though, that there is some sort of impression that I left with them and with my friends in the Thrive ERG that can help make a difference in the lives of Nordstrom employees who suffer from mental health issues. Erik Nordstrom, if you are reading (because that's what CEO's do. They read personal blogs all day.), please help lead the charge on improving the mental health of your employees!

I'm not living at home. Jen needs her space to sort through being hurt by me, by those conscious decisions I made as well as those depression made for me, as do I for myself to get better. My brother has been awesome in hosting me and in balancing my need to get out and be engaged in life and work as well as letting me convalesce.

I'm in an outpatient treatment for mental/behavioral health now. I've been through this three times already, and my very first night of this go-round I was just amazed at all the stuff that I had learned previously but had neglected to continue practicing. Like going to the gym for our physical health (something I need to start doing again!), we need to be practicing and exercising our mental health on a regular basis.

I'm writing this on Wednesday 10/26, and I am probably going to save publishing it until Monday 10/31 or Tuesday 11/1. I have an interview that I did with Amazon Web Services and the decision is set to be made next Monday. I would not want this post to affect that either way. And I suppose if I wait until 11/1 then Nordstrom can't let me go for cause either. It's sort of shitty that I have to hold my tongue on the internet for those reasons, but this is the age we live in.

--- Writing again later ---

I got too close to a good friend and ended up ruining that friendship and endangering my marriage. People have asked why. The truth is I don't know. I don't have a good answer for Jen nor anyone else. The only other thing that I want to say on the subject is that I miss my friend, very much, but I know she wants the best for me. What is best for me right now is to concentrate on my marriage. I also want to apologize for breaking my promise to her that I wouldn't hurt myself while she was out of the country. What can I say? I'm a liar.

I've hurt Jen too many times. She deserves better. She deserves someone who always puts her first and then her boys. I haven't done that. Of course I want the best for her, and I thought I could give that. But I have been selfish. I put myself ahead of her and at times put my job ahead of her. And I am so, so sorry for that. I hope she will want to keep me in her life forever. 

I did not get the AWS job. I am okay with that. It was not the right job for me, though I did all I could given the circumstances to come away with that job offer. I have several better things in the works. One of them is going to find out that I am the perfect fit for them.  

There are better days ahead. 

Kanban, an Interlude

I was interviewing a candidate from a large, well-known online retailer yesterday, and we were discussing the development process he uses in his current job. Like most candidates I speak with, his organization uses a form of Scrumbut. "Scrum, but we sometimes the sprints are two weeks long and sometimes they are four. Or "Scrum, but we use developer days instead of points." Or, most egregious of all, "Scrum, but we don't do retrospectives." (That constitutes a blog post all its own.) At Nordstrom we do Scrum but don't have dedicated ScrumMasters. I think that is becoming more and more typical (Also a topic for another post.) and has been this particular candidate's experience as well.

I asked about Kanban. "Oh, we tried that when I first started. It didn't really catch on." Why did he think that was? "I'm not really sure. People just didn't see the value in it." Were there WIP limits (limits to the amount of work in progress)? He didn't think so. So, no. Were there explicit policies that defined when tasks moved from one status to another? Not explicit ones. Then it was really no wonder they got no value from the kanban process. That's not to pick on this big e-tailer either. One of my own teams at Nordstrom is facing that same challenge, and it isn't something one changes overnight.

I have seen at least several interesting origin stories of kanban from the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo to a visit to a PigglyWiggly in the United States. Most everyone agrees, though, that its use as a form of development practice began with developing automobiles at Toyota in the 1950's. As line workers reached the end of their parts inventory, they sent a bin to a backroom along with a card signaling just what part and how many were needed for the worker to keep a sustainable pace of work. Two foundational pieces of kanban as a software development process were born then: that kanban is a "pull process" where the worker is pulling just what they need rather than having parts pushed to them, and that the work is limited to just what the worker can accomplish. In doing so, Toyota eliminated waste associated with a worker having too much of one part and not enough of another, workers waiting around for needed parts, and workers spending too much time restocking unneeded parts.

A key principle of Agile software development is promoting a sustainable work pace. Limiting the amount of work coming into the pipeline to only the amount of work that can be worked on at any given time is optimal. I could go into an explanation of Little's Law here, but anyone who has been in a traffic jam with seemingly no reason other than the sheer volume of cars on the highway knows that by forcing even more cars onto the highway people are not going to get anywhere sooner. Unfortunately many businesses feel like things will go faster if they just add more cars so long as those cars are all laying on their horns. "But THIS one is HIGH priority!" Or the dreaded, "What if we added more people?" Yes, because what would really help this evening commute to move along is to bring in the dump trucks, excavators, and graders to begin adding lanes at this very moment.

A WIP limit in kanban is meant to allow just as many cars onto the highway as the highway can currently support. Without it, we just end up with traffic jams of in-progress items. It also limits a developer's context switching. It's been shown that switching between even similar tasks is wasteful. Switching contexts for a developer not only means getting in the right frame of mind to tackle an issue, but perhaps even switching IDE's, logging into various tools, perhaps even switching machines. Developers sometimes containerize complete work environments in Docker for the purpose of making switching contexts easier. We know that even small changes though are extremely wasteful. Limit the developers to working on one item, perhaps two at most, and a good deal of that waste is eliminated.

Then there are the explicit policies of how work flows through the system. These process policies are key to eliminating waste around confusion as to what should be worked on when. Going back to our traffic analogy: Imagine driving along roads with no traffic signals and no street signs. You will hopefully still get to where you are going, but needing to stop and assess the intentions of others at every single intersection will make the journey much more hazardous and take much longer. Kanban, being an Agile process, doesn't prescribe the rules of how work flows through, but allows for the development team to do this themselves. What kanban does say, however, is that the rules of the road must be explicit and transparent to the team. It does the team no good if someone needs to clarify the meaning of some policy in order to move work along just as it makes no sense for us as drivers to need to look up the meaning of different colored traffic lights each time we come to an intersection.

It is also important that each team decides for itself the policies that work best for the work they are doing and their interactions with each other. Agile practices acknowledge that each team is more or less different in what they work on and how they work. I believe that particularly as we move to doing more remote collaboration, make these policies explicit and visible to the team becomes more important as does allowing the team to tailor the policies to the way they wish to work.

Kanban can be a real benefit to development teams, but just as driving a car entails much more than just knowing that one pedal makes you go and the other makes you stop, there is much more to the kanban practice than simply a kanban board.

Ireland, Rewind to the Fecking Beginning

FUDGE! Only I don't mean fudge. I mean THE Word. The queen mother of dirty words... That's not really a bad way to start a post on Ireland as it is a fairly common word in the Irish vocabulary -- The real dirty word I mean, not "fudge". However, I didn't intend on scaring away those with sensitive ears right off the bat. The thing is, though, I lost my little notebook that I carried around hundreds  of miles around the Emerald Isle taking notes of the things we did that day and little observations. That's part of the reason that I am so late in getting around to finally writing more about Ireland than just the adventure that we had in getting back. Procrastination due to anxiety, stress, and depression play into it too. I'm clawing my way back to some normalcy just by starting on this. A friend sent me a quote about just getting started and then everything falls into place or some such thing. The quote's around here somewhere; I just can't find it at the moment.

Anyway, I figure I can piece together what we actually did each day based on the photos that I have and that my mom and Jen took. (My mother was a photo taking MACHINE... which i guess would make her a camera. Hm.) I will probably lose some of the little observations that I had written down, though what is going to stick with me are the little memories that I still have stuck with me. Maybe those will do. Or maybe the photos will evoke some little thoughts as well. I'm not sure. There were just little things, like thinking it was sort of funny how Trinity College had sweatshirts the sort that fans would wear to a football game. Maybe fans do stop in the university bookstore to buy some apparel before rugby matches or quidditch tournaments or whatever they play on a Saturday afternoon.

So I know that we landed in Dublin. Yeah, that much I am certain of.. but I need to rewind. Our flight from Orlando to Washington Dulles was delayed by almost an hour. We ate dinner at MCO. I had a hazy IPA, which was my first alcoholic drink in 171 days. I need to write a completely separate post on drinking during this vacation. It's a complicated feeling, even now after we are done and back home. Then I had a Sam Adams Hazy IPA NA (non-alcoholic), which was really pretty good. Less hoppy than the IPA I had just had (sorry, I didn't take notes on what brewery that first one was from).

Okay, so the flight from Orlando to Dulles was fairly uneventful. I don't remember what I did on the flight and don't have my scuzzy little notebook. Do people still use the word "scuzzy"? The plane got  to the gate in Dulles, though just as the flight from Dulles to Dublin was supposed to be taking off. They held that flight, though, as there were apparently enough of us trying to make that connection. Besides myself, Jen, Mom, and Mike, there was another couple that was in our group coming from Cape Canaveral. Plus I think there were three or four others. Also, I had Usain Bolt's brother pushing my wheelchair. I've never gotten through an airport so quickly. So thankfully we all made the flight to Ireland, plus Jen had worked it that we had a ton of extra leg room, you know, for my booted leg and all. (If you are just joining us, I made either the courageous or insane decision to have lapiplasty done to correct the bunion on my right foot a couple months before leaving for Ireland. The initial surgery got pushed out due to me getting Covid over the holidays, so at this point I was just six weeks out from surgery and had just been put into a walking boot rather than a full cast. I was still on crutches, though.)

I do remember what I did on the flight from the U.S. to Ireland. I slept. However, I really didn't even sleep all that much because the in-air entertainment had the show "What We Do in the Shadows". I honestly don't know what prompted me to decide to watch it. I think the one beer in Orlando must have gone to my head because I was laughing out loud at this ridiculous vampire comedy. Laughing out loud with headphones in on a full plane. I believe I binged the full season. And haven't watched another episode since.

I really thought that being away from work and doing a lot of travelling from place to place would afford me a lot of time to get caught up on all the reading that I've been meaning to do. If you plan on following my series of blog posts regarding this trip, notice just how often I mention reading a book. Compare this with the number of times I mention watching rugby or playing video games on my tablet or staring vacantly out a window. Compare the number of books I mention finishing to the number of bookstores I stop in and number of books I mention buying!

Anyway, we made it to Dublin without the plane crashing or even losing an engine. All the way across the Atlantic Ocean with zero engine failures. Tied a record.

Ireland, Arseways

This is going to be my first blog post of probably a number of them about our Ireland trip. I am doing this in a backwards fashion I suppose because I am starting off with how we got back home, which was its own adventure. It isn't exactly an adventure in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel kind of way, so this comes with no warranty on just how adventurous or entertaining you, dear reader, might find it. As always, I write these blog posts primarily to remind myself of what occurred in the past as my memory begins to play tricks on me and secondarily to amuse my mother and my wife. Hopefully there are enough little tidbits of information or amusement to satisfy the rest of you.

I should also add that I began this post on March 21st and then wrote the rest over the next week or so. It hasn't really been edited for consistency. You'll have to put up with that as well, but I believe in you, reader; you'll manage.

We got back from Ireland late last night. I have a lot of catching up to do, and not just with my writing here. There is so much to catch up on at work! I got through last week's emails just now. Honestly I can barely keep my eyes open at the moment. I think I may need to continue this tomorrow. Maybe I can see just how much of yesterday's travels I can get down here.

We started off by waking up at like 4:45 AM Dublin time. That is UTC time. Here in Florida we are on UTC -4 right now. So, that would have been 12:45AM here. Got the bus in front of the hotel at 5:30 AM and were at the airport just before 6. We were trying to make the same flight as Mom and Mike that was leaving around 9:30 AM I think. That one was through Newark. We were banking on people not making because of Covid, and I think that some people didn't but the flight was way oversold and there was a long standby list. So, we didn't make the flight. The thing is, there is a US Customs pre-approval in Dublin. You go through regular airport security, and then you wait to go through another security line to go through U.S. Customs on that side. That way you don't need to go through customs once you land in the U.S. Sounds great in theory

The problem occurs when you don't make the flight on standby. Then you are no longer cleared to be what is considered under U.S. control. Practically like being on U.S. soil once you've cleared Customs. You're only cleared for that one flight, though. Once you miss that flight you need to leave and go all the way back out to ticketing. Then you get new security documents to go back through regular security, back through double-secret security, and back through Customs again.

The interesting thing is Jen had "SSSS" on her document the first time through but not the second time through. Apparently 4 S's means you are flagged for extra security measures. So she got an extra pat down and had her luggage searched the first time going through security but not the second time. I don't know what she did to get the flag, but there is now probably an FBI file in Washington on my wife.

I am still in the walking boot and on crutches from my foot surgery. (Honestly, i really feel like at this point I could just lose the crutches, but it wasn't like I was going to leave them in Ireland anyway.) So I also had a wheelchair through the airport. That probably saved us, because by the time we went back out, the regular airport security was tremendously long, and security to Customs had at least doubled. I don't think we would have made the Aer Lingus flight we ended up taking to Boston.

Why Boston, you ask? Simply because it got us back into the States. There is still a Covid mandate that to return to the U.S. you need a negative Covid test administered no longer than a day before your flight. You could possibly do one the day of the flight because results are guaranteed inside an hour (Mine took a good 40 minutes.), but when you are getting the first flight out in the morning it really isn't possible. Plus you need to schedule the appointment ahead of time. It isn't something you can really leave to the last minute. Not to mention, what do you do if you test positive? And this is what happened to 4 of those 15 other people travelling with Jen and I on this tour. A fifth had tested positive earlier in the week, unbeknownst to the rest of us. That's an entirely different story. Anyway, Mom, Mike, Jen and I were all negative and getting the Hell out of Dodge.

That whole mandate is yet another thing working against travelling standby you see. There was a direct Aer Lingus flight to Orlando on Tuesday, but that would have meant having to retest on Monday. Even being bumped to a flight on Monday would have meant having to reschedule a test for that same day on Sunday. Then there was the fact that 5 of 17 of the group had tested positive meaning the rest of us probably had at least some of the virus swimming around, and Jen and I did NOT want to run the risk of coming up positive and being caught in Dublin for another week.

I would definitely fly Aer Lingus again. They, like everyone else in Ireland, were extremely friendly. We also bribed the crew with $5 Starbucks cards. I cannot recommend this approach enough. You do have to know just how many flight attendants are working a flight or just make sure that you have plenty of cards onhand. This will usually get you free drinks if you want them. It will at least get you the full can of Coke rather than the little glass of it. Anyway...

So we land in Boston in terminal C. There is a Southwest flight going to Baltimore in roughly an hour from when we landed. Why Baltimore, you ask? From Baltimore there is a Southwest flight to Orlando with seats available. You can't go from terminal C to terminals A or B in Boston's Logan Airport without going out of the secure zone. I again had a wheelchair pusher available when we deplaned, so that was fortunate again. This walking boot definitely proved to be a wise investment!

Let me say that while we definitely took as much advantage of me being in the wheelchair as possible, it wasn't like I could have easily managed getting through the airport without it. I can't go very far in the boot without crutches, and with the crutches I can't manage hauling my rollerbag. I was relying on Jen pulling both our bags when we couldn't put those on the wheelchair. And there were some very long distances through some of these airports including through Logan.

I'm trying to think of when and how we got cleared in Boston. We DID need to go back through security once we got to the B terminal. There was only a few seats open for the flight to Baltimore. I sat in my wheelchair for a bit, so that must have been when Jen got us cleared as well as saying we needed the extra leg room for my leg, so we got the bulkhead for the flight from Boston to Baltimore.

Well, at least we have made it to Baltimore now! But there are no seats available on this next flight. So we waited like you do when you are on standby like this.

A few minutes before the door was supposed to close on the flight, someone asked the operations agent (that person who scans your ticket as you board the flight) if she was set, as in were there any more to come. She said no she still was missing some people. (YAY) Just then two guys come running up. (BOO) One guy got on but the other got turned away, as it looks like he was sent over from a flight he missed, but didn't have a boarding pass yet. (YAY) Then 3 college-aged girls who had been sitting in the boarding area all along I think finally realize they are about to miss their plan and come hustling over in their sweats and bedroom slippers still looking at their phones (BOO) Then they start telling the ops agent that their friend is still coming and yelling, "Alicia, they're going to close the door!" Alicia comes shuffling over in her slippers with her backpack and pillow and enormous cup of what used to be Dunkin coffee before she dumped a pint of milk and six sugars into it. (BOOO!)

The ops agent closed the doors to the jet bridge with two open seats (YAY!) So I was cleared to get on. Jen had taken "fourth" for the flight (with the provision that I got on). Fourth means that she would fly in the jump seat and could act as needed as a fourth flight attendant on the flight. That also means no alcohol for her (not that we were having drinks coming back at this point) and no watching movies for her. There were only two seats open on the flight. One was in the first row at the bulkhead again. A middle seat, of course, wedged between a slightly larger than average woman in the aisle and a much larger than average man in the window seat. Jen informed me later that of the two seats, I got the better deal as the other was way at the back wedged next to an even larger man. One other man, well a boy really because he looked to be in his 20s and possibly could have been the young man who was originally turned back by the ops agent, boarded behind me. I guess he got that back seat.

I'm pretty much fine at this point being wedged into a middle seat. Hey, I'm flying for free! Anyway, it got me where I needed to be.

It was nice being back in Florida. It is really always nice being back in Florida. The weather in Ireland had been quintessentially Irish. In the upper 40s and lower 50s with wind and rain most days. So Orlando at 11 pm in the upper 60s felt fantastic.

I feel like that's about all that anyone cares to hear about and then some! So I've finally wrapped up getting back from Ireland. Now it's time to go back and actually get to the fun details of the trip itself. As they say in Ireland - I'm doing things arseways.

Pros and Cons

I wrote the following as a LinkedIn Article, but I think the idea serves for anyone who uses lists of pros and cons to make a decision.

Yesterday I needed to work through one of those tough managerial decisions that occasionally come up. As an engineering manager most of the managerial decisions are relatively easy to make. There are Nordstrom engineering standards, compliance standards, and many best practices for most of what the developers do. The most difficult part of those decisions is really just keeping up with the standards and practices.

The people management decisions are made using a mix of sympathy or empathy given the situation, past experience, and for me, having a background in psychology. Some of that can be learned, but I think the key is empathy: Put yourself into the position of the employee you are supporting and ask yourself how you would like to be treated in that situation.

I'm going astray from my purpose for writing this, which concerns making those difficult decisions as a manager. I've learned a practice that you all are probably familiar with to help make decisions like these, though with an added element: a Pros and Cons list.

Typically when we use a list of Pros and Cons to making the decision, we use the viewpoint of making a change in the status quo and the effects, positive and negative, that change has on our situation. What we don't typically do is also evaluate not making a change or even not making a decision at all and leaving the status quo. Adding that element to this practice has made creating a Pros and Cons list much more valuable to me in decision making.

I'll use a personal decision rather than a managerial decision as an example: Having bought our condo in Cape Canaveral, I was weighing driving my car to have and use down there versus continuing to Uber to and from the airport there or renting a car when we are there. I made a Pros and Cons list beginning with the positives and negatives of having a car in Florida, including the initial act of driving it down there. On the negative side, it was a very long drive down there. On the positive side, that drive down got me an opportunity to see a good deal of country I haven't seen or don't often see including seeing my cousin in Nashville. (It also meant seeing a lot of Kansas, which I'm not sure quite fit into the assets column.) On the plus side, we would save money. Even renting monthly parking down there, with Jen being an airline employee, was cheaper than a one-way Uber from the Orlando airport to Cape Canaveral. On the negative side it left us with one fewer car here in Colorado, particularly a car for the snow, as we would just have the Rogue and the Camaro.

That's how we all typically do a Pros and Cons list. Then, though, I added the additional perspective of what were the advantages and disadvantages to NOT driving my car down. Some of these were merely the opposite of the first list. We would spend more money when we went to Florida Ubering or renting a car. I would not get to need to make a long drive, but I would also not get to see the middle of Kansas. Then a thought struck me: by leaving the car in Colorado it wouldn't be subject to the salt air of Florida and save some life of the car. Being exposed to salt air is really a negative of taking the car down, but I hadn't thought of it at the time. The different perspective brought that out. Maybe it was that I was geared to see the benefits of a situation more than seeing the disadvantages. Sometimes having that different perspective can help you see that there are more disadvantages to a change or advantages to not making a change than you saw at first. Or perhaps vice-versa if you are more inclined to see the negatives in a situation. 

Ultimately I chose to make the drive down and leave the car. I could always change my mind later and drive back to see how Kansas had progressed in the interim. I'm happy to say that so far the decision to take the car down has been a good one.

There are a lot of managerial decisions I could use the practice on as well. Is this employee best to work on this new system or better off where they are? Does it make sense to update this version of the database now or leave it as is? Should we deploy this new software version in this sprint or do more testing? Put yourself into each situation you are considering and make a list of positives and negatives for each situation in order to gain perspective on your decision.

Unpacking, series 1 episode 4, Odds N Ends

The Domo-kun plush is a travelling companion that I picked up at the Japan pavilion at EPCOT. He brings me joy. Domo kind of serves as my emotional support, an emotional support monster, if you will, when Jen or Buck isn't with me. I have needed that support, frankly, in the past particularly when travelling for work. Just having that snarling yet joyful face to spark a tiny bit of happiness in me when I need it.

I had pulled a big handful of scraps of paper from my bulletin board in my office. There are a few post-its with inspirational or otherwise meaningful sayings on them. There are a few addresses of people that I like to write to once in a while, well very infrequently. I like hand-writing little notes, especially postcards, and I want to do that more often. There are a couple other little mementos that I keep on my bulletin board. For example, I have the ticket stub from the baseball game that I drove home drunk from and got my DUI. A reminder of where I was and to not go backwards.

There is a post-it with the ten Buddhist perfections, virtues (https://www.learnreligions.com/paramitas-the-ten-perfections-of-mahayana-buddhism-4590166) that I strive to work on, as well as the Buddhist Noble 8-fold Path (https://tricycle.org/magazine/noble-eightfold-path/). I don't talk or write about Buddhism, religion, or spirituality very much. I know my own practice it is something that I really want to work on more. I want to work on taking time out of my day to meditate as well as putting into practice these values I keep posted right above me.

I grabbed a stack of photographs. Not a stack really, but a flip-book thing as well as some that I keep framed around the office. Grabbing the photos I did in a relatively short time, not taking the entire weekend to go through every individual photo I have, shows me that I really need to digitize all my photos, as well as put together an album of important photos if I ever really needed to leave quickly. The flip-book thing has some photos important to me from over the years, but should probably be updated and would work better put into an album or one of those Shutterfly books.

I packed my diplomas from both high school and college. I packed my athletic letters from high school as well as some academic achievements and letters of recommendation. There are a couple of my running medals, finisher medals from my marathons and a couple from races where I placed in my age group. There are various reminders I keep of achievements over the years both from mental and physical pursuits.

(It is a little strange for me to just be listing off these souvenirs that are important to me but probably aren't so important to anyone else or all that interesting to read about. Again though, this is for myself to look back on, so I'll carry on detailing things.)

There are some little love notes that Jen wrote me and then hid along with these little hearts that she made and hid. There are a couple little pictures the boys made me when they were little.

There are a few things that I've written over the years. There was sort of this underground magazine in high school. I also started writing my own little newsletter when I was in high school in France and carried that over to college - typed and photocopied and snail-mailed in the days before the internet. A blog before blogs. I was presumptuous then to think that anyone would want to read what I wrote, and I've just never stopped presuming that.

I wish that I had kept more of the things I had written in the past. I have some of the decent things I have written, a few of the things that weren't terrible. One of the things about writing is that I never really think that anything that I've written is very good. Some of it is just less terrible than some of the other stuff. There is always room for improvement even in the best of the things that I have done. Maybe that is why I don't organize my writing better -- It is never really completed. There is almost nothing that I would stick in a frame and hang on my wall. I don't know how I would ever come up with more than a handful of pages that I thought was complete let alone being able to publish an entire novel.

All-in-all putting this bag together has demonstrated that I really need to work on organizing these souvenirs and then digitizing them. I really need to pare down on the things that I hold onto including the souvenirs. Did I really need to keep that European Civ final from college that I got a B- on? I may have wanted to remind myself that I once took European Civ. but haven't looked at any of those papers since college. 

Now I am just finishing up with some odds and ends. I packed this red metallic Cross pen that I just absolutely love. I have a matte black one as well, but really love the red. It has sort of a stylus end on the top, which is handy. I really enjoy how it writes. I have a couple basic fountain pens and while I enjoy using them, they are more trouble than they are worth.

And I brought about half a dozen journals. Did I mention those when I mentioned the other books? I have maybe another dozen journals that I either haven't started writing in or just have a bit written in. One of the ones I am bringing is sort of this diary that I make a short entry into every three months or so just to show the passing of time. One is a soft-cover one with The Wave design on it that I keep like a personal journal. There is more personal stuff in there, but also I save that one for when I am high and have some incredible idea, which the next day morphs into just sort of a good, half-baked idea. I used to write in it when I was drunk as well. That really taught me that despite what I might think, my creativity was not improved by whiskey. Then I packed a leather bound one given to me my Jen long ago that I never really put to use yet. Once the Wave journal is filled up, I think that will be the one I probably use most. It is one of those that is almost too nice to foul up with silly writings.

I think I left behind the one where I had started some other story ideas. I also left behind my work "bullet journal", which I can hardly get by without. These different journals each with their little starts here and there at different times - They show me that I really need to be more organized about my writing. I need to compile it into one place. This is good for just the morning pages style journaling, but I need to do better really putting ideas together and sitting down and writing, writing. BY that I mean writing and not typing. Typing is much faster for me, and once I'm on a roll, it makes sense. Writing brings out the creative juices though. I need to organize them into a place and then digitize my writing as well. I have lost so many not-terrible things I have written in the past.

Unpacking series 1, episode 3, Regarding Fish on a Plane

So let's speak of books. First, one of my possessions I've come to prize most is my Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. I have pared down my library significantly. I still have boxes full of books and a couple bookshelves full, but only about a third of what I had. While I love the feel of a real book and being able to mark up pages, being able to have a library at hand is really incredible. It is especially useful if one is packing a bag of their prized possessions and loves books as much as I. Asking me what books I would save and what I would leave to burn is like, well... I'm not talented enough to work a Sophie's Choice joke in here. Let's just say it would be no simple decision.

I decided to include my old edition of Great Expectations as a representation of all the old books I have. It is in two volumes published by the New York Book Company in 1909. Not the oldest books I have, but Great Expectations is one of my favorite books.

I chose my Men's Devotional Bible, New International version from amongst the variety of Bibles I have. It is a good version and probable the most portable Bible I have. I have several Bibles that have more sentimental meaning and are definitely less portable including one that belonged to my grandfather. I have A LOT of Bibles. I'd do well to just use one of them. The Bible will always make my list of desert island books and not because I'm religious. It's just a really good read. There are plenty of the boring this-guy-begat-this-guy-who-begat-this-guy parts, but then there are really interesting parts like Samson just wiping out the Philistines or Daniel and the lions, Jesus and his parables, angels playing trumpets causing hail and fire mixed with blood to rain down upon earth, and the entire book of Leviticus with its craziness. The entire bibliography of Stephen King doesn't have so much imagination.

What the Buddha Taught is honestly a little closer to teaching what I consider my religion. Really, the lessons I've come to through it were probably the same as what Jesus was trying to teach me as a child. It's a straightforward look at Buddhism and its core teachings.

My final book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's a marvelous book, not about Zen (and not so much about motorcycle maintenance either.) I can't say enough about it. Someday I will devote an entire blog, not just a blog entry, to it. My edition is underlined and highlighted and has tons of those post-it flags, and that is just from reading it through twice. That's the reason I can't leave it behind - all the work I've put into it -- But then the next time I read it will be like the first and I'll rediscover it all over anyway.

I could go on for a while explaining the books that I didn't pack, but as I said, I think I'll leave what got left behind for another entry. I should mention Phaedrus here. I mention Phaedrus because that is the name the narrator of Zen gives his old self. It is also the name I gave my betta fish. All my pets get literary names. Well, not the chickens. Chickens don't get named. I've had Phaedrus since August of 2020, making him the longest lived betta I've had. If you get a betta, don't put them in a tiny, tiny bowl. Yes, they can live in a puddle, but they aren't meant to. Also, get a heater. I have a good heater now to keep his tank at a nice temperature and he gets regular water changes with distilled water. I think this makes a difference. Anyway, enough of my soapbox about betta fish. Still, I guess I would have to leave Phaedrus behind. I am rather tempted to put him in a big ziplock bag and try and carry him onto a flight just to see if I can do it. Supposedly TSA will let you bring a liquid onboard so long as there is a living fish in it. Who knew? Still, I think he'd rather just battle it out in his little warm fish tank until hopefully I returned.

I have enough space here too to add that I also packed my Kindle Fire. It is a little superfluous I think packing the Paperwhite AND the Fire. The paperwhite is just way better for reading with. I like using the Fire when I get in the habit of using it. It is also kind of redundant with my phone though as well. I think if I didn't have access to a laptop, though, I would probably appreciate having the Fire with me. Anyway, it makes me want to get into the habit of using it more often.

Unpacking - Series 1, Episode 2 The Sportsball Edition

 The next little portion of my pile is sportsball related. I included my Champ Bailey Broncos jersey. The Payton Manning jersey I have is definitely nicer, but Champ is my favorite Bronco. I like wearing jerseys. They're tough, good for layering things underneath, and easy to wash. I had to include a Cubs jersey in the bag as well. The home white one I have is really nice, so that one got the nod.

I might as well talk about the baseball caps here as well. I included a Cubs hat, of course. I selected kind of a grubby one that I wear quite a bit. It annoyed me to no end when people claimed I was a fair-weather Cubs fan during the World Series run and the year after. Yes, there were a lot of people who jumped back on the Cubs bandwagon that year, and I was happy to have them climb aboard. I had suffered plenty for many, many years leading up to that point, though. This hat has the sweat if not the blood and tears.

The other hat I chose is my Boise Hawks hat. The Hawks are now an independent minor league team after having been affiliated with the Rockies and then the Cubs. They don't make this particular hat anymore, which is why I chose it as opposed to one of my other minor league hats. I love collecting the minor league hats. They have great logos and sometimes cool stories behind the team names. If I had to reseed a new collection, I'd start it with this Hawks hat.

My Northwestern sweatshirt is in the mix here as well. I have to have a sweatshirt, and going with my alma mater seems the right way to go here. The Champion sweatshirts are always nice. My last Northwestern one lasted over twenty years. Granted, by the end it wasn't something I would really wear out of the house, but I got my use out of it and then some.

The other Northwestern article I included is my Northwestern scarf. (I should add here that I'm really kind of glad that purple is Northwestern's main color. I like purple in the wardrobe.) I don't know why scarves aren't bigger in the U.S. outside of where and when it gets very cold. Of course they are great for freezing weather, but they are useful too in merely chilly conditions. You can wrap or unwrap a scarf to regulate temperatures as needed. Chic Europeans understand this. I'd probably prefer a slightly lighter weight one for regular use, but this one does the trick, and is purple!

I'm bringing four pairs of socks. Now, should I wind up in Florida I probably won't wear socks at all, as I spend all my time in flip-flops. If I only have my bag of stuff, I'll have to pick up some flip-flops as well, because I didn't pack any! I think these four pairs of socks will cover me for whatever I need, though. I am wearing my shark socks. I actually have several pairs of shark socks. These ones are blue and remind me that some days you need to be a shark, just like some days you need to be Flash Gordon. They didn't work all that great today in that regard, to be honest, but they did keep my feet relatively warm. I did pack a warmer pair - SmartWool ski socks. SmartWool socks are pricey but worth it. I've had this pair many, many years and while they've worn pretty thin in places, there are no little holes for my toes to peek out and embarrass me in the airport after going through TSA. (Who am I kidding? I don't take off my shoes like some sort of pleb. I have TSA-Pre!) Those socks are black, though it'd probably be better if I packed a pair of black dress socks as well. Anyway, I needed a brown pair to fill out the triumverate of men's solid sock colors. I chose a brown pair with flamingos on them. Flamingos remind me of Florida.

I chose a couple pairs of non-descript boxer-briefs since going commando for an extended period is kind of eh... stinky. The only thing to say generally is that they are boxer-briefs. I prefer those, particularly to run in. I do have to mention the shark underwear though. Sense there is a theme here? Yeah these ones have some pretty ferocious great whites on them. Also, they have this kind of front packet that is supposed to give the jewels some support. It's a little gimicky. The important thing is that there are sharks.

I put one dress shirt in. Well, it's long-sleeved and has buttons, so sort of dress shirt ish. It's a genuine Rockmount shirt, brown with hops leaves and flowers embroidered in green along with the mother-of-pearl snaps. If you visit Denver, you need to visit the Rockmount shop downtown near the train station. The shirts are awesome and true originals. They are not cheap and with the embroidery, you really have to have them professionally cleaned. But if you ever have an issue with one, you can just take it in to them and they will fix it while you wait. I love them. They create an exceptional product and then back it with great customer service. I have a couple other shirts from them. One is a similar western shirt, but more traditional with swallows in red and white on a black shirt. That one doesn't fit as well as this one and isn't quite as unusual.

I'll finish out unpacking my clothing by talking about the jeans. I packed a pair of plain navy-blue Levi's 501's. For the past couple years, I've only bought 501s, though in different colors, cuts, and sizes. The main reason is that 501s are built to last. I've had Lucky brand jeans. They are expensive and super-comfortable and wear out inside two years. I have 501s that I'm not even super fond of the color anymore, but they will never, ever, ever wear out, so I feel kind of stuck with them. Plus 501s are just cool, and some day I plan on being cool.

That isn't a whole lot of clothing. I should have thrown in a pair of shorts, but nothing was really bringing me joy. No swimsuit because the good swimsuits are down in FL and anyway, I'd rather have an excuse to go naked. (I'd be a nudist if I could.) I should probably throw in another pair of 501s. I also have a ton of dress shirts that I really do like, but they are all still hanging in dry cleaning bags from 2019. I really am hoping that we will have more opportunities to "dress up" again in 2022 and that my nice clothes and shoes can make a reappearance. For now though, I gave the space over to books.

To be continued