Unexpected Conversation

I had a great conversation over email at work today. It started by someone forwarding an email over the staff list. The email was similar to this one, but modified in ways that didn't improve it. I rolled my eyes a little and ignored it. Another guy responded (to the staff list) with a rebuttal of why the information needed to be taken with a lot of salt, which I entirely agreed with. The following email exchange (summarized) occurred between the two of us (not on the staff email list):

Me: <Joke illustrating one of his points in terms of Toyon's business model.>
Him: That's funny, you should post it to the staff list.
Me: No, the person that posted it already took some flack from you for that email. They don't need any more from me.
Him: Wow, that's a good point. How did you learn to think like that?
Me: I picked it up over time based on how that sort of thing can hurt me and how I know I've hurt others.

Later...
Him: Based on our earlier conversation I changed an email I was writing. <Gives text where he reworded his opinion to remove the words "obnoxious" and "crap".> I'm used to being obnoxious as part of my character. I'll have to see if I can give it up.

It was really neat to realize that I've definitely picked up some sensitivities over the past few years to know how to control my own obnoxious and sarcastic personality when I realize it won't be appreciated. I still have more to learn, but that conversation showed me that more of that is coming to me naturally now.

Weekend Results

I had a very busy weekend. It was a good weekend, but not one that I would want to repeat. Here are a few results from the weekend:

What I Did Do:

• Moved almost everything from our old apartment to our new apartment, which involved one 17' U-Haul load and about 10 car loads to accomplish.
• Drove down to LA and back to see Liz and wish her the best for her coming marriage.
• In total drove about 300 miles.
• Biked about 10 miles.
• Slept in 3 different cities on the 3 nights.

What I Didn't Do:

• I failed both to shower and to shave one day. (It is very unusual for me to miss either of those. I think the last time that happened may have been when I was traveling internationally for 36 straight hours.)
• Went for over 48 hours without picking up a Bible except for purposes of moving it from one apartment to the other. (Again, very unusual for me.)
• On Sunday, I ate breakfast, but then only ate a candy bar and a root beer (Only things I could find in our place that I could eat while driving) up until about 9pm.
• I went over 60 hours without checking my email.

As far as moving goes, all that's left for our old place is to grab a few straggling things after work tonight, clean it up a little, and meet with our landlord to return the keys and get our deposit back. Our new place still has a lot of organizing left to do, and one more roommate to move in.

I Didn't See What Was Really Going On

Last night at Balboa class I had an interesting experience. My second partner struck me as ...unusual. She seemed really out of it, like she didn't know what was going on around her. When the instructors were demonstrating things she just stared at me with a blank look in her eyes. She kept at least one hand on me when we weren't dancing, but when we did start dancing she didn't meet me halfway into dance position - as if she didn't realize that I was getting ready to dance with her. It was weird, a bit uncomfortable, and to be honest, I was kind of glad to move on to my next partner. Towards the end of the class one of the instructors made a helpful announcement.

By the way everyone, this women is blind.

Moving Done!

Except for the part where we actually move. So really what I mean is that we signed on a place this evening so we know when we're going to move. We will be living here - out in the Santa Barbara boonies known as Goleta. Certainly it isn't the perfect home, but it struck a balance that I hope will work well for us. We get our keys on Friday, and should be moved in by the end of the weekend.

God and Money

Saturday of last weekend my Church had a seminar called "God and Money." It was aimed at young adults - those who are starting to set lifelong habits involving money. The time was divided up into two parts. The first hour was biblical teaching on money by Mike Willbanks, the college / young adult pastor at my Church. I liked a lot of what he said. One thing in particular stuck with me. I'll reproduce it from memory:

Is money good or is money bad? Is it a blessing or a curse? It is both good and bad, but never neutral. It all depends on how you control your money. Think about your life as a train, and money as fire. When properly controlled in the engine, fire provides a powerful driving force for the train. Money can be used to enable great things. On the other hand, consider if that same "good" fire was in the rest of the train - It would be an absolute disaster. Money is like that. If you don't keep your money in check, it will ruin your life.

The second hour was basic financial advice from two professional financial planners that are part of my Church. It wasn't anything particularly new to me, although one thing struck me as kind of scary because of what it says about our culture. They advised people to always use cash or debit for purchases, never credit cards. At first I thought, that's dumb, I use them all the time, and pay them off in full every month - no big deal. Then I thought about the fact that this was coming from professional financial planners. These guys have probably seen how thousands of people handle their money. That most likely means that an incredible majority of people cannot handle credit cards responsibly and get themselves into huge trouble with them, and that's out of people that are responsible enough to go to financial planners in the first place.

Yet Another Housing Update

This won't be the last housing update, because we still haven't picked a new place. I do know that there will almost certainly be three of us: Philip (current roommate), Mark (another engineer from my Church), and myself. Ever since returning from Christmas break we've been looking at places like crazy. We have until January 31st to move out of our current place, so we are starting to reach crunch time. We are down to the point where we need to just choose a place from the places we have seen. None of the places are perfect, but I think we're down to only having a few reasonable choices. A few of the big factors:

• Price: Housing in Santa Barbara is expensive. We were looking at 3-bedroom houses and apartments. The most expensive ones we saw were $2500 / month plus all utilities. There are plenty that were more expensive, we just filtered out anything more expensive than that. For reference the least expensive place we found was $2000 / month, but most were at least $2200.
• Size: Most of the places just weren't big enough for us. There was one apartment we looked at with a bedroom that was about 9'x8'. I don't consider that to be a bedroom. I consider it a walk-in closet with a window. A lot of the rooms we've seen just weren't designed to have a bed, a desk, and a dresser fit inside of them in their traditional orientations.
• Distance from Santa Barbara: The closer you are to downtown Santa Barbara, the more expensive housing gets. Things get noticeably less expensive as you move towards Goleta. For reference, the $2000 / month place is well into Goleta, but it is also the largest place we've seen (in terms of internal floor space) and is in excellent condition (not the case with all places). Unfortunately, the one person who cares the most about being close to work (because he bikes to work about 4.5 days out of the week) works right in downtown Santa Barbara. The better deals we've seen are well outside of his biking range.

Obviously we are going to have to strike some compromise. As soon as I know what the final verdict is, I will post something about it.

The Next Session of Home Group Begins

After taking a four week break for Christmas, our home group met again last night. We'll be starting a study on Colossians next week, but last night we just spent more time getting back into each others lives. We had an unusually small group last night - 7 out of our usual 14 - but I think it really helped facilitate our ability to be intimate with each other. Although I wouldn't kick anyone out of our group, I really do wish that we were smaller. Seven people seemed like a much better size for sharing deeply with each other about our joys, sorrows, and struggles.

The Proposal is Done!

This week I haven't actually put much time into it, but it is a bit of a relief to know that as of 6am EST this morning (you can always resubmit up until the deadline), I no longer have the option of working on it.

The Political Interpretations of Oz

I recently got a nice two volume set of all 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum. They were books that I dearly loved when my mother read them to me as a child, and since I hardly remember anything about them anymore, I've been eager to read them again. Tonight I finished the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. I've certainly been enjoying them, but what I've found particularly interesting is that there is strong reason to believe that the original Oz book (not the 13 sequels) was written as something of a political allegory. I discovered this before starting the first book, and there were several things that caught my attention as a result. One in particular caught my attention. If you somehow are unfamiliar with the story of the Wizard of Oz, then this will be a bit of a spoiler:

The Scarecrow was now the ruler of the Emerald City, and although he was not a Wizard the people were proud of him. "For," they said, "there is not another city in all the world that is ruled by a stuffed man." And, so far as they knew, they were quite right.

It's impossible to know if he meant that as a specific jab or not. He always maintained that he meant the book purely as a children's story and nothing more.

There were quite a few other things I found interesting. To name a few:

• There are huge sections of plot that were omitted from the famous movie. Similarly, there are major sections of the movie that do not exist in the book.
• The compass on the official Oz map shows east pointing west and west pointing east. At first I assumed he must have been a Mudder, although that seems unlikely since he died in 1919.
• It turns out that originally he didn't intend to write more than one, but the flood of letters he got eventually inspired him to keep writing.

Ok, I think that's enough of my ramblings for tonight.

One Way or Another, I'll Get My Dancing In

Since before I moved to Santa Barbara there's been an Arthur Murray Dance Studio that has been nice enough to offer their floor to swing dancers for free 9:00-11:00 every Wednesday night. They recently decided to stop doing that, which was quite a disappointment to me. Now the only swing I have in Santa Barbara is every other Friday night.

Fortunately I've discovered a few other outlets. First off, it turns out that there is swing down in Ventura (about 30 miles "south") on the alternate Friday nights, so it looks like some of us will go down there at least this Friday, and I suspect some others as well.

Second, I discovered that there is a six week Balboa class offered on Wednesday nights. Tonight was the first night, and I figured it was about time for me to learn Balboa*. It was a lot of fun. Unlike the dance classes I took in college, tonight I was substantially below the average age. Also the ratio was closer to 1:1 (women:men) than it was to 3:2. In college it seemed like most classes the women were lucky if it was better than 2:1. In any case, soon I may be semi-competent in Balboa.

*: Part of my intermediate Lindy Hop class in college did one or two lessons on Balboa, but I never learned it that well to begin with, and have since then forgotten most of it.

Third Place!

I just got back from swing dancing. They had a casual Jack and Jill competition. There were about 30 leads and 30 follows to start with. I was pretty excited to make it into the top round with only 3 leads and 3 follows. I may have been last place out of the finalists, but I'm still pretty happy about making it into the top 10% - Plus I had a lot of fun dancing in it.

Housing Update

As I mentioned here, Philip and I have to find a new place to live. I just wanted to give you a brief update of where we're at. Right now it could be just the two of us again, but there are likely to be three, or even four of us. There are two other men from my Church that are considering moving in with us. We looked at a few places yesterday. We saw a two bedroom apartment that I didn't care for, and then a three bedroom apartment that seemed reasonable to me, and the others seemed to like it fairly well. Hopefully I will get around to posting more as things progress.

Taking Work Home

This entry will pretty much be a clarification of the title. I've been working at Toyon as a full time employee for about six months now and I have never done any of my work anywhere except at work. I somewhat hope to keep that boundary, although I may let it slide as long as it doesn't mean the rest of my life is being pushed out for the sake of work. In any case, that is a question for another time.

I've always been fairly happy that whatever is going on at work I can just leave there emotionally at the end of the day. This week has marked the first time when I've really been preoccupied about work outside of work. One of the parts of working at Toyon is writing proposals for SBIR contracts. They come out four times a year, and we are encouraged to write for them. Internally we have a review process for which the drafts are due Monday morning. I'm writing my first proposal this round, and it's been taking up a lot of my time and has been somewhat overwhelming. Another downside of the whole process is that we are only funded for a limited amount of time on it. Any additional time you put in is on your own time*, although it is expected that you will keep working on it until you have something worth turning in. I am already past my limit, and I suspect that by the time I'm done I will have put in at least a couple days worth of my own time on it. The combination of my first deadline, not really enjoying technical writing to begin with, and being over my paid time limit has certainly contributed to my general outlook outside of work. The bright side is that I am learning from this experience, and I should be able to write my next one much more quickly, perhaps even within the budgeted time.

*: If you win a proposal you get a bonus, so assuming you win some that you wouldn't if you stopped when you ran out of paid time, then you are still getting paid for time above and beyond. I also want to note that I'm somewhat mixed on this policy. Although I don't want to get into why, I can understand reasons to keep it in place.