Too many inventions too quickly

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Daily writing prompt
The most important invention in your lifetime is…
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It’s hard to pick an invention from “my lifetime” when I don’t even know what was truly and originally invented IN my lifetime.

When I first started to write out my answer for today’s prompt I had settled on Wireless Technology, but the more I thought about it there are certain elements of “wireless” that are older than any person still living today. So, I stopped writing about it, deleted everything and took a break.

Now, I’m sitting down several hours later to think about it and I realized that technology has advanced so quickly and confidentially that I don’t know what to pick.

I think, just for the sake of putting SOMETHING out there, I’ll stick to an abbreviated version of what I had thought about before regarding wireless technology.

Most people take for granted what is considered “wireless” because they don’t think about them, or because the technology is obsolete and no longer in use. Like TV remotes. Still in use, but people these days probably forgot they existed (until I mentioned them just now) because the vast majority of people probably don’t need them anymore! So, although the TV remote might not have been invented in the last 35 years, wireless technology has continued to evolve. The electromagnetic spectrum, which includes the infrared light TV remotes use (even Nintendo’s Game Boy Color had IR sensors), is the backbone of all wireless communication, and we harness it in so many ways. Between that and the invention of The Internet, they have drastically altered the world we live in today. Broadband and shortwave radio eventually led to Bluetooth technology which is probably the most relevant for today’s prompt because it was invented in my lifetime (but I didn’t want to settle with just Bluetooth because it’s a subset of the wider and more important idea.)

Anyways, this is all just my opinion, so whatever. Wireless Technology is the most important invention of multiple lifetimes.

My ideal day needs more hours

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Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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There really aren’t enough hours in the day. So, let’s change that!

My ideal day would be like 36 hours long, at least. I know the Earth’s rotation won’t allow that and our bodies aren’t accustomed to it, but that’s okay. This is all purely hypothetical.

So, 36 hours. How do I fill that to make MY ideal day? I’d start by sleeping in and getting about 12 hours of sleep. I love sleep so much, but I have to respect the order of the world we live in by having a job and paying bills.

After I wake up I would probably eat a small breakfast on the patio while I watch the sunrise, about an hour at most spent here. (I don’t currently HAVE a patio that faces East, but if we’re making the day 36 hours long then I can live anywhere I want.)

After breakfast would be some game time. Not sure what I would play, but I would probably spend 4 hours on that? Maybe 6? Followed by lunch, and then back to gaming for another 4-6 hours. Let’s say that puts us at 25 hours. 11 hours to go!

The last 11-13 hours would be running around doing chores around the house or running errands, followed by dinner, and then ending with a couple more hours of game time.

Super simple and fairly straightforward. Although, the most important part of all of this is just that I would have 36 hours in the day. I could totally spend half a day hiking, have a light lunch at the top of the mountain, and then the rest be roughly the same. If I still worked 8 hours in the day I would have a ton of time to fit in all the things I would want to do.

Wait, I forgot to include writing! I would definitely cut out one of the time slots for gaming and swap in writing for 4-6 hours. This still assumes that I have a regular job, though. If writing was my full time job then it would just replace that for 8 hours.

Either way, my body would hate me for being up for 24 hours.

Time changes everything

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How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

Wow, this prompt could get deep!

First off, just because I thought it was amusing, I wanted to share that I spent a good minute or so trying to think of a title for today’s post. Soap Opera titles like Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns came to mind because the names of these shows are so simple yet so fitting, and the content of these shows is relevant to the general question of the prompt. (For the record, I don’t watch these shows, I just know they exist because my Mom watched them.) Then I thought of the line Fry from Futurama uses in regards to the yogurt in his baseball cap. “Ya see, it used to be milk. And well, time makes fools of us all.” That’s when I decided to keep things a little higher level for my answer, rather than deep dive into my past to try and self-evaluate who I am today.

Time really does make fools of us all. Children look at the world very differently than adults, but they too eventually become adults and see the folly of their naivety.

For myself as a child the world was in some ways full of promise. Until Mom passed away. That’s the kind of major life event that drastically changes a kid. I was only 12, and while I had the concept of death in my head it didn’t seem REAL until it hit my family in such a strong way. I didn’t really know what to think after that, but the world became a little more grey and uncertain.

Then a couple years later, my Dad remarried. A few years later and we moved several hundred miles away. Two important things were instilled in me through those events. Relationships can change, and people need to keep moving forward. As much as Dad loved my Mom, he needed a partner to keep him going, and as strong a bond as I may have had with friends, those friendships couldn’t last.

As an adult I take those two things to heart. Friends have come and gone, some due to differences of opinions and others because of life choices/directions. I don’t like to think of it as “moving on” but rather “moving forward” because there’s no going back.

From To-Do to To-Someday

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Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.

That title is a bit of a mouthful! I also toyed with the idea of borrowing a line from Strong Bad Email #61 to go with “To-Do List this Sunday, Sunday, Someday” or something like that.

Anyways, on to today’s prompt.

I use Google Calendar all the time, and I have the Google Tasks widget on my phone’s secondary home screen. The neat thing about this widget is I can check things off the list based on what tasks are pre scheduled on my Calendar AND I can add my own items directly in the widget. Makes it easy to add things on the fly if I need to remind myself of something that needs doing. Unfortunately, if something has a due date assigned then it appears in the list chronologically, and anything without a date appears at the bottom. So as it stands, I have several items at the bottom of the list that I forget exist. Just simple reminders of things I can or should be doing with my time.

  • Books
  • Games
  • Gym routine/schedule
  • Lifestyle plan? (And yes, it has the question mark)
  • Meal Plan
  • Minis

Technically the items Books, Games, and Minis are more like suggestions while the rest are actual To-Do items. I like to keep them on the list anyway.

So, as you can see in the list there are a few “planning” items and they never seem to get done…

For those that are curious, the “Lifestyle Plan?” To-Do item is there to remind me that I need to take some time to reconsider how I structure my use of time every day and my priorities if I want to achieve goals. Sadly, I also avoid it because lifestyle changes are difficult.

I’ll get to them eventually.

Getting my cook on

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What’s your favorite thing to cook?

First off, I’m not a recipe blogger, so I apologize in advance for not giving you all my life story centered around a favorite dish before actually getting to the point.

Recently I’ve taken to cooking something akin to Beef and Broccoli (or is it Beef with Broccoli?)

I found a simple enough recipe for the sauce not too long ago and started making my own version without measuring ingredients, or even having all of them to begin with, and got it down so it’s easy to throw together.

  • 1 or 2 cups Beef stock (I had chicken, which seemed to work just fine)
  • 1 Tbsp Soy sauce
  • 1 or 2 tsp Oyster sauce
  • Cornstarch slurry for thickening

I’m sure I’m missing one or two things but that’s the base of the sauce. Toss all of it except the slurry in a sauce pan, bring to boil, add slurry, simmer until thickened. Easy! Typically I only use a couple spoonfuls of the sauce each time I cook, otherwise everything would end up swimming.

The beef part I’ve been lazy with and just used ground beef. However, in an effort to be ever so slightly healthier, I’m not using any cooking oils for the broccoli and other veggies I decide to throw in the pan. Instead, I happened to have some less lean/kinda fatty ground beef so I just fried up the beef and used the fat that renders out. I was just cooking it as a patty and setting it aside so that I didn’t have to go through the hassle of draining.

For the veggies I was using some combination of onion, potato, and zucchini. The potato, being a starch, was thrown in there so I didn’t need to cook rice. The onion and zucchini were for flavor and to drive a healthier balance to the fatty meat. I just chopped up all three and fried them, adding a pinch of salt.

See? Rather simple recipe, and it’s been something I’ve been able to quickly throw together at home either for lunch or dinner.

A childhood after dial-up

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Write about your first computer.

My Dad has always been a tech junkie and worked in the telecom industry through most of my childhood, so we’ve always had a computer in the house. I couldn’t tell you much about the computers themselves from back then, I just remember that my Dad liked to be an early adopter of technology.

We had DSL before almost everyone else in our area because of my Dad’s job and needing to help test it out. He figured out how to play multiplayer Doom over LAN between our family computer and his work laptop. When we got one of the early generation CD burners, my brother and I learned how to modify computers when he showed us how to open the case and swap around parts. Another perk of his job was being able to bring home copies of the latest operating systems to install, so I got to first experience Windows 95 & 98. All kinds of these things that eventually would lead to him bringing home some decommissioned computers from work and giving us one of our own so we could play games and not hog the main family computer. But in all of that I wouldn’t say any of them were MY first computer. I wouldn’t get that until I was in college.

My first computer, the one I had acquired for myself, was a pre-built model from somewhere like Dell or HP. Would have been around 2007-2008, so you can imagine what a mid-tier gaming computer was like back then and cringe at the thought of trying to use it nowadays. It served its purpose, though, and got me through college. Well, it and my laptops. I had two different laptops through college because during the first few years they loaned them out to students, but they did away with that program. I had to take a quarter off which meant turning in that loaner laptop and then purchasing my own when I was ready to come back. Those were my first laptops.

Laptops aside, I was fortunate to grow up with technology and see all the different changes happen in real-time. All those firsts led to where I am today with my computers and other gadgets.

Bloganuary 31st: vulnerability and facing fears

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What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

To answer this prompt I have to open up a bit and make myself vulnerable. There are two things that come to mind for what I’m most scared to do.

I happened to be awake just after midnight and got a sneak peek at today’s prompt, so I took a moment to think about it as I fell asleep. The first thing that came to mind was how scared I would be to quit my job, and the different reasons for doing such a thing in the first place.

The idea of quitting my job has been in the back of my mind for a long time because it’s primarily tied to the idea of trying to write full time for a living. Having a job working for a large organization means stability and security. Getting a steady paycheck, benefits, and insurance makes life easier. Going down the route of writing full time more or less means being self-employed and income would fluctuate based on sales and contracts, while benefits and insurance would be 100% self-funded. I know it’s doable, I just don’t have the foundation to make that kind of leap to begin with, but the idea still scares the hell out of me. If I wanted to be able to do it at all I would need to have some substantial savings in place and hopefully land a contract with a publisher that provides me some measure of reliability.

The other thing that scares me to do is meet people, and I don’t mean just casually through work or something.

Meeting people with the intent of building a relationship, either platonic or romantic, scares me because it means investing time. Time you don’t get back that could have been used meeting other people should things otherwise go south. It also means opening up to put yourself out there at the risk of being hurt and disappointed. Romantically I’ve been burned a few times, and found that I’m just fine on my own. Platonically I’ve been betrayed or learned something about a person that I didn’t vibe with at all and needed to check out. It’s hard to find people that you can truly connect with and not find something that is a huge red flag. I don’t want to waste that kind of time and effort. I keep my social group small because of this. We’ve built up that trust and respect, setting the appropriate boundaries needed for each of us to be transparently ourselves. Nobody is 100% transparent in public, and for me to want to be comfortable with meeting people, to build those new relationships, means needing a space I can feel comfortable in for openly sharing who I am while trusting that others are doing the same with clear intentions. You would think places like that exist, but that’s entirely dependent on the people at those places regardless of the people running it.

I’m just going to keep on rambling if I go further, so I’ll leave things there.

Bloganuary 30th: Add another to the complaint box

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Bloganuary writing prompt
What do you complain about the most?
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This information might be out of date since I last worked at a fast food burger chain about 16 years ago, but one of things I learned (when getting ServSafe Certified and taking corporate training exams) was the disparity between bad service and good service. When a customer has a bad experience somewhere they typically share that experience with seven or more family/friends/acquaintances as opposed to a person who had an exceptionally good experience sharing with an average of just three people. Not even just a regular good experience where you get exactly the kind of service you expect, but the kind of service that went above and beyond expectations! Again, these numbers might not be completely accurate anymore, but the point stands. Bad experiences yield more complaints.

So with that in mind I’d like to take a moment to say that I generally don’t complain, and I don’t go out of my way to complain about poor service unless it was REALLY BAD. The reason for this is because I’ve been in that situation. Sometimes the stars just line up for a cosmically shitty day of work. I can take a step back and think about the little details that add up to cause that experience. This is something a lot of people don’t seem to do, and that extends beyond the customer service experience to the thing I really wanted to address in today’s post. Critical thinking.

The thing I seem to complain about most is the lack of critical thinking that seems to happen more and more these days. People making snap judgements and instantly being harsh. People who fall for misinformation and help spread it further. Like those stupid memes of math problems that lead to people fighting over the answer because some of them forgot how to utilize order of operations. In those moments, when something seems off and people are bickering back and forth over what is right, that is the time to step back and apply a little more critical thinking. Why are we fighting over a silly and irrelevant math problem on social media? How are some people arriving at a different answer? Which all leads into the next thing that I complain about most.

People lack the ability to stuff their ego and pride and admit when they are wrong. Seriously, when faced with overwhelming proof and easily verifiable/testable logic, why double down on being wrong? I don’t want to dig into that too much, because I don’t want to try and research the psychology behind people refusing to admit their wrongness.

I also don’t want to keep ranting about this because it will just irritate me for the rest of the day.

Bloganuary 29th: Watching vs Playing Sports

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What are your favorite sports to watch and play?

It should come as no shock to anyone that, given my hobbies, I do not play a lot of sports. However, I DO play some sports. I don’t invest heavily in them, but I enjoy them well enough as is. I also do not go out of my way to watch any particular sports, even if I do like to play them.

First off, sports I enjoy playing are bowling and golfing.

Bowling started around age 10 when a friend of mine invited me to join his youth bowling team. His mom talked with my mom, they got things squared away, and I played two seasons. Of course, my younger brother needed to join us as well, and it was fortunate that my friend has a younger sister about the same age, so they were on a team in their age bracket. Unfortunately, life took some odd turns, so we only played those two seasons, and then we stopped. I did still enjoy bowling in high school and beyond, though, and it was an odd stroke of luck that when my family moved to South Dakota we found a couple of the small farm towns in the area had their own bowling alleys. So I got to play, sometimes even for free because I had friends who worked part time there.

I didn’t pick up golfing until high school. My Dad gave me a set of used clubs and I happened to have a friend who liked golfing, so I was able to go with him a couple times. Of course, again, it wasn’t for long because we moved to South Dakota shortly thereafter, and in another odd stroke of luck the small farm town where I finished high school has a golf course. Sadly I didn’t make any friends that golfed, so all I did was hit the driving range a few times now and again. Then I took like a ten year hiatus because I moved around a bit during college. Now, my oldest nephew is getting into golf, and I’ve gotten to go with him and my sister’s a few times!

Outside of actually playing those sports, I don’t watch them in any way. I occasionally watch soccer and football with friends and family, but I won’t go out of my way to do so. Same as with any other sport. It’s just not my thing.

Bloganuary 28th: The Lottery Plan

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What would you do if you won the lottery?

Winning the lottery would be life changing. Who wouldn’t want to win a massive amount of money? The things you could do…

Well, over the last 15 years or so I’ve talked at length with a few select friends and a couple of family members about such a wildly improbable scenario. I’ve done my research, and even read the news articles about past winners, to help devise a very serious plan.

The first step would be to not tell anyone. At all. Nobody can know if I had won the lottery and won hundreds of millions of dollars.

The second step would be to sign the back of the ticket, ensuring nobody else can claim it over my dead body.

The third and fourth steps are crucial. I would store the ticket somewhere safe, and then get in contact with lawyers that specialize in large estates. Preferably from a reputable law firm with offices all over the country.

Then the real planning could begin.

Evaluating my current life situation, from debts to threats and all things in-between.

Paying off debts is a no-brainer. Don’t want to leave yourself open and give anyone a way to collect more than they’re owed. Figuring out the necessary safety and security measures for myself and loved ones is incredibly important as well.

I’m sure some of you have seen the memes.

“If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t say anything, but there would be signs.”

I’d try to minimize those signs, for safety.

I would obviously do a few things to elevate my situation, such as buying a house and some toys. Then, with the help of the lawyers and accountants, set up for the future. Regular disbursement of funds for bills, investing, charity, etc.

That’s the gist of it!