For me, it's nice to look at something at the end of the day and see that I actually accomplished something. When I was working construction for a few short summer months in high school this consisted of digging a ditch or something and then being able to observe the place where the earth used to be, and the pile I made with the stuff I removed. This is one thing that makes starting a new job frustrating. A good example would be spending 4 hours trying to order business cards. It's like ditch digging in a swamp. Thankfully, I was able sit back and scroll through a deck of slides at the end of a day this week and think that I had actually accomplished something - always a good feeling, although I acknowledge that creating a powerpoint deck is not nearly as manly as raising a barn (for instance).

A quick aside - I'm really enjoying my job, and am thankful that I get to do what I'm doing now. The people I work with are great. It may just be that I have lower expectations after my last job, but I think this job is exactly what I wanted coming out of bschool; it just took me a year and a half to get there. A quick aside on that aside - I got word from an old colleague this week that the department I used to work in has been dismantled. Some of my former coworkers have been shipped off to other units, and some are still in limbo. Makes me glad I left.

Fingernails have always bugged me. Whenever I have a lot on my mind, cutting my fingernails just seems like a colossal bother. When they become embarrassingly long, I often have difficulty locating the fingernail clipper, causing me to go a week or more with nails so 'beautiful' that Mari asks if she can paint them.

At work I often have to research companies that we compete with, or that are in adjacent markets. Some of these outfits are based overseas. One annoying thing my brain does - when I find out a company is in England, the voice in my head insists on reading all of their materials with a British accent. What's up with that?

At church today we sang a hymn with a little ditty where only the women sing, and then the men come back in later (He Died, the Great Redeemer Died). There are lots of hymns like this. I hate them. I think they sound bad, and are prejudicial. I have yet to see any 'men only' sections in the hymns. Today our organist, who is a woman but apparently agrees with me, just barged through the offending section, bass notes and all. It was great.

This week's Sunday school scripture reading has been less than uplifting. During reading Genesis, 35-40 or so, I found myself yearning for the comparative calmness and high moral standards portrayed on network TV today. This section of the bible should be referred to as 'desperate concubines of the Pentateuch'. The unsavory-ness of these chapters has only been enhanced by the fact that I'm reading the NIV. With the King James Version, the flowery language is ambiguous enough to sometimes gloss over what's really going on (at least for me). The blunt NIV leaves no such wiggle room. It's nice to finally have Joseph's story roll around.

Speaking of network TV, an actual excerpt (as best I can recall) from a TV show called CSI Miami:
Horatio Caine : Marisol, what's wrong?
Marisol Delko: (staring out huge window) During my fight with cancer, I was trying so hard not to die, I forgot how to live. There are so many things I've never done. I've never traveled. I've never had a baby.
Horatio: Marisol, it's not too late.
Marisol: (In a whisper, as though not daring to believe her ears) What did you say?
Horatio: It's not too late.
Marisol: Oh Horatio, if you say it is true, I believe you!
Horatio: That's because it is true.

As Dave Barry (from Miami!) would say, I'm not making this up. For Nig and Stu – perhaps Clive Cussler is now doing dialogue for CBS TV shows.

I object to the use of the phrase "various and sundry". First of all, it's repetitive (m-w.com says so). Second, it's often used in presentations and talks by someone trying to sound smart. Lastly, if these two words were nation states, "sundry" would be a small, mostly useless protectorate of the word "various". I say this because "sundry" is almost never deployed without being paired with "various". Same goes for "trials and tribulations", although I don't think these two are quite as bad. Props for the person who reads this blog and comes up some more good word pairs.

That's it for now.