Women as Managers

I've been thinking about why my job sucks. When I hired in, it wasn't too bad. It was still a job; I get paid because otherwise, I wouldn't do this stuff. When something is fun, you pay to do it. When something sucks, you get paid to do it. But the job was tolerable. So I started thinking back trying to figure out what changed.

It was when the IS department got women as managers.

For those of you still with me, let me explain. I have worked with a lot of women (I work in health care) that would make fine managers. The problem is that they are competent, so the organization cannot afford to loose them to management. I don't know if it is something genetic, cultural, or what, but men are capable of effectively managing a group of people that can do something better than they can. For example, a mediocre male engineer can manage a department full of bright engineers. So General Motors can promote a not-so-brilliant engineer to manage a group of brilliant engineers and get good results. But for some reason, this never works with women. The smart ones don't get promoted, just like men, but for some reason, the mediocre ones suck ass as managers.

So that's what did it. The IS managers were male when I started. There was a conscious effort to change that, and I have watched my job become less tolerable as each female joined the management ranks. Affirmative action strikes again.

Tell me again how we are all the same?

Work Sucks

As I keep slogging into work knowing that it will all be over soon, I take comfort in knowing I am not alone. I haven't crossed the line yet, but I will soon. I am seeing signs that management is starting to notice that I have taken all the shit I am going to take. Will it get me fired? Yep. And I can't think of a better outcome. Getting fired will set off an entire cascade of events that I should have done years ago. I am past the nervous stage and starting to see the possibilities "out there." The world is a big place, and there are so many possibilities: how in hell did I get stuck in this god-forsaken grey box?

Anyway. Maybe opinionista will let me shack up with her after I get fired. I don't think I would want to live in New York City permanently, but it might be fun for a year or so.

Relief

Someone very near and dear to me dodged a bullet today. One bit of stress out of my life.

Love you, babe. You did good.

Saying Stupid Things

Maybe it's a guy thing. Sometimes, I think I am genetically incapable of just keeping my mouth shut. Instead, I think about something for days, working out the perfect wording, timing, location; then totally throw up a brick when I actually decide to speak. I was trying to make things better, and instead probably made things worse. I should just keep my mouth shut. Now I've probably hurt someone I care deeply about.

Anyway, my only hope is that her graciousness and her love for me will allow her to just forget I said anything.

Sorry babe; I'm an ass.

Married People Live Longer

Mike Belkin, writer of the Unfit comic, must be divorced. He hits the nail on the head too many times in too many ways to not have the experience of marriage, and there is no way he could be married and get away with stuff like this. Good shit. The comic, I mean; not marriage. That's just bad shit all the way.

More on Marriage

Remember when I said marriage was a bad deal? Still don't believe me? This is what every American woman becomes once the honeymoon is over. Everything you do is wrong. Everything is your fault. Your very existence is an affront to all that is good and holy and PC simply because you have a dick hanging between your legs. Maureen is not some freak of nature; she is just a more-outspoken version of your little cupcake. She is what your little cupcake will grow into when you don't build her a big enough house, make enough friends that she approves of, or take her on the vacations to which she feels entitled merely for converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.

We all know it's all about her. We also know who it isn't all about.

You have been warned. You won't listen. You will wish you had. I know I sure as hell didn't and wish I had. Prostitutes, I tell ya. That's the way to go.

Food Service Workers

This is some funny shit. I remember my days as a suds-buster and cook. It didn't last long, but I did have fun doing it. I worked at a national chain for about a year, then worked for a small, family pizza joint for about a year. I don't think I would bother with the chain again; you are literally a cog in the machine. The family restaurant wasn't too bad. I actually enjoyed the work, most of the time. I don't think I would mind going back to it, if there was any way to get hired. I'd have to invent a series of dead-end jobs for my resume so I wouldn't be "over-qualified." I could replace all the programming jobs with day-laborer at construction sites. I could even toss in the occasional "crew leader" position to make myself look qualified to be a shift manager at a taco place.

Look for me at your local Burger Barn. I'll be the one in the cow outfit.

The Historical Jesus

If you think you know what happened in Palestine in the first century, then I challenge you to spend some time here. I dare you. I haven't read more than 10% of what is there, but if every evangelical read, researched, and truly thought about this material, evangelicals would be about as plentiful and snake-handlers. Which is why any evangelicals that stumble across a site like this close their eyes, stick there fingers in their ears, and start singing "I Will Lift Your Name on High" at the top of their voices.

Why Guys Stay Single

This is not a joke. This is the sort of "meaningful" conversations you will have with your wife after the honeymoon. A woman can literally suck the life out of you. Take it from someone who has been there; just don't do it.

The flip side, of course, is that she can have a complete life that is kept from you. That's just her "having her own space." Don't even think you have any right whatsoever to even ask the question. Just shut up and pay the bills. And make sure she knows exactly where you are and what you are doing, and who you are doing it with at all times. And be prepared to repeat verbatim every word of every conversation you have that she is not a personal witness to.

If that sounds like fun, then go ahead and get married.

More Intelligent Design

When you become the butt of jokes, you can a) rethink your message, or b) celebrate the fact that you are "suffering for the cause of Christ."

My money is on b, only because I have seen it happen again and again in my 40 years. I'm sure there is some sort of mental illness at work here.

Intelligent Design

There seems to be a minor blog storm (at least on the blogs I frequent) about intelligent design. It started with Scott Adams claiming the no one on either side of the origins debate is believable and both sides misrepresent the positions of the other. I've stood on both sides of the issue and have over five years of in-depth study under my belt, so I figure I must be able to talk as intelligently about the subject as someone who draws (damn funny, if you ask me) cartoons for a living.

I agree with Scott Adams' main point: the two sides talk past each other, not necessarily out of a deliberate attempt to confuse (although that certainly happens), but more from the fact that there just isn't any point of contact between your average fundamentalist and your average scientist. They exist in different worlds and talk about different ideas using opaque language, or, worse, use the same words to mean very different things. And just to keep things interesting, we have fundamentalists who are unbelievably weak on doctrinal issues, and a publicly educated general population that is completely ignorant of what the scientific method is. (I learned it in the 4th grade, had it reinforced in 5th and 6th grade, studied historical cases of it put into practice in 7th and 8th grade, and put it into personal use in 9th through 12th grade. This was in a dirt-poor fundamentalist Christian school. Why the average public school is unable to accomplish this is beyond my ability to comprehend.)

This isn't going to be real organized. Sorry.

The idea that there is some intelligent agency "behind" the physical world that gives us a purpose is shared by a large majority of Americans, including scientists. This belief would imply the idea of an intelligent designer that somehow affects physical reality. But here things quickly get ugly. What do I mean by "affecting reality?" I could mean anything from God tweaked the constants of the universe to make it conducive to self-aware life forming through wholly naturalistic means, to God created the entire universe 6,000 years ago in six days, and sustains it second-by-second with His thoughts (the belief I was raised on).

To confuse matters more, there is a political movement called Intelligent Design (ID) spear-headed by the Discovery Institute (DI). In spite of a $7 million annual budget, the DI does absolutely no research in the lab or in the field. Instead, these assclowns use that $7 million to con local school boards into trying to shove ID into high school biology classes. Their goals and methods are all clearly outlined in a memo known as the Wedge Document. The result is invariably a lawsuit by the parents that always goes against ID. In the most recent case (Dover, PA; Kitzmiller v. DASD), voters didn't even wait for the judge's decision and voted out the entire school board.

So what is the DI stand on the origins question? Well, that's a little tricky. In an attempt to gain as wide of a support base as possible, they employ a big-tent methodology that makes figuring out what ID stands for about as easy as nailing Jello to the wall.

Take one simple example: the age of the earth. Scott Adams states that one of the ways evolutionists misrepresent Intelligent Design is to claim they believe the earth is 10,000 years old. This, according to Adams, is not true; ID accepts that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. In reality, some advocates of ID accept that, some think it is somewhere in the millions, some think the earth is 10,000 years old. Some simply refuse to answer the question, even when directly asked in a courtroom. I wish I could find the link in the transcript from the Kansas hearings (the problem with being a pack rat is you have everything, you just can't ever find the one thing you are looking for), but there was one ID defender who dodged, ducked, dipped, dived, and dodged the direct question, "How old is the earth?" until he was finally forced to concede that he thought the earth was somewhere between 10,000 and 4.5 billion years old. Wow. Them's some big-ass error bars.

Another example is trying to find out just what did God (or god, or The Designer, or a designer, or little green men, or...) design? Cosmological ID says God set up the constants of the universe to make sensient life more or less inevitable through natural means. Biological ID says that the universal constants make the rise of self-replicating cells very unlikely, thus God made green goo. Michael Behe says that the human eye, the blood clotting cascade, and bacterial flagella are "irreducibly complex" and could not have evolved. Well, ok, so the blood clotting cascade and the eye did evolve, after all. But not the flagella. No way. God designed it so intestinal bacteria could more-efficiently give me the shits. William Dembski says... well, no one is really sure what the hell Dembski says other than it is mathematically impossible to deal a game of solitaire, because the odds of the cards coming up in any given pattern exceeds his universal probability limit.

OK, lets assume God really likes seeing people people doubled over from intestinal distress (not to mention killing tens of thousands of children every day). How did God design the flagellum? Did he tweak a gene sequence? Does he reach down after every cell division and glue one on? How can we tell? These questions have been directly asked to Behe, Dembski, and countless others. No response.

There are many other questions that the DI fellows don't like to answer, like what is the theory of ID? How can this theory be tested? Why do you take money from Christian Reconstructionist goofballs that don't believe in the germ theory of disease and desire the violent overthrow of the United States government in order to establish a theocracy?

Now to pick on the evolutionist side. Are there arrogant pricks in biology? Sure. They infest every other human endeavor, so why should science be exempt. Do scientists do a good job of explaining their work to the lay public? No. Part of the problem is that our science education is so bad that the average man-on-the-street has no chance of following even a high-level conversation on, say, the evolution of the blood clotting cascade. Another part is that science is moving so fast, not even those working in a scientific field have any hope of keeping up. There are only so many hours in a day, and most people are not going to spend several hours of each one reading up on the latest research on fruit fly genes. Do scientists ever explain what they mean by words like data, hypothesis, or theory? I've never seen it. Does the popular media airbrush out all the might's and maybe's and the-data-currently-suggests's from scientific papers? You bet. Are there scientists who view (and say publicly) that anyone who believes in God is brain-damaged? Most certainly.

But here is the difference between science and ID: ID rests on personalities; science rests on data, repeatability, and falsifiability. It doesn't matter how big a prick Dr. X is; if his work pans out, is supported by the data, can be repeated by other scientists, generates predictions that are then born out, his hypothesis will be accepted. If it continues to succeed in the face of new data, it may one day become a theory. Someone like Dembski has nothing other than a loud group of disciples. There is no data, no experiments to repeat, no hypothesis to falsify. Nothing but politics and hot air.

Worse, much of what ID supporters say to their faithful is provable lies. This is what drove me out of the church. Growing up, all I ever heard was how close-minded scientists were; how dogmatic; how devoted to scrubbing the world clean of God; how willing to ignore and suppress inconvenient data; and even, how satanic. When I began looking closely at the claims by both sides, what I discovered is that description of science perfectly describes the Discovery Institute and much of the ID movement. The scientists I now talk to on a routine basis are exactly the opposite. Do scientists get stuck in a rut? Is it hard for them to break away from orthodoxy when a new idea is proposed? Sure. They are human, after all, in spite of the assertions of fundamentalists to the contrary. But the ones I know understand this and actively guard against it. In the long term, the data wins, not the dogma.

To Hell With Family, Let's Make Money!!

The opinionista describes better than I ever could exactly where we went off the rails 40 years ago. Everyone over the age of 30 complains endlessly about how selfish and greedy teens are today. I would submit that they are merely imitating their elders. Men that put wealth ahead of all else used to be pariahs (Ebenezer Scrooge being the obvious fictional stereotype), but are now treated like minor celebrities (Donald Trump, as one example). We all have to keep running on the hamster wheel 24-7 or the gears of human progress will grind to a halt.

Well, I bought into all that, although not nearly as fully as many of my peers have. Except now I'm stepping off the hamster wheel. If everything goes as planned, New Year's Day 2006 will find me unemployed. After that, I have no intention of spending another minute in a cube farm. I will sell, give away, or toss everything but the bare necessities, including the Money Pit I live in. After that, I have no idea what comes next, other than I won't be doing what I have been for the last 20 years.

Retirement is in the Air

Not for me, of course. I never stay at a job more than a few years, so I have never been vested in any retirement plan. Any money I accumulate in a 401K-type plan, I just cash out when I leave a job and use the money to keep the bills paid while I look for a new job. I used to put substantial amounts of money into various mutual funds and other financial scams, but I grew tired of the below-money-market rates of return, once I subtracted all the fees to put money in, take money out, and just leaving the money there. I'm sure someone was making a lot of money, but it certainly wasn't me.

So what brought all this on? My employer has a new retirement plan. It's such a great deal for the employees!! And it just so happens to relieve the organization of millions in future liability under the existing defined benefit plan. Now understand, I realize that every defined benefit plan is headed for bankruptcy, so I understand the need to make these sorts of changes. But please don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining. The end result is a massive reduction in expected retirement income if I work here until age 65. Not slightly less; significantly less. And that assumes no major financial "events" in the next 25 years, which I find to be increasingly unlikely.

My retirement plan is very simple. Step One, learn to live with less. So much less that no matter how feeble I get, I can always earn enough to get by. Of course job one is to ditch the damn house. Talk about a money pit. The second part is to move to a temperate climate. In the north, it will cost me $4,000 just to heat my home this winter. If I move to some hothouse like Arizona, I'll spend a similar amount to air condition a home. The ideal place is somewhere where the temps are pretty much in the 70's all year. There are such places, and they are not hard to find. Step Two, don't live long. My health problems will cut my life short, probably no more than 65 or 70. That's not pessimism; that's what the actuarial tables say. No life insurance company on the planet will sell me a policy, and with good reason.

So I live for the moment, rather than planning for the future. I'm sure that makes me a horrible person; immature, selfish, and stupid. I figure I'm going to burn in hell anyway, so I might as well have some fun in the 20-30 years I have left.

Religion is Stupid, Part II

Pat Robertson is once again proving that religion causes brain damage. Thanks, Pat, for confirming what most of us already knew. You are an ass, everyone who supports you financially is an ass, and any church that does not denounce you in plain language from the pulpit deserves the fate you have "called down" on Dover.

My pet theory is that Robertson is actually a closet atheist (and homosexual, of course). His original plan several decades ago, was to destroy Christianity from the inside. He would work himself into a position of trust, then make a series of public statements that were a) completely consistent with Christian theology, and b) so stupid on their face that every person with an IQ north of 75 would bust out laughing and never darken the door of a church again.

But there is one thing Pat didn't count on: the sheer stupidity of the average church-goer. He now finds himself trapped in an institution that worships the very ground he walks on. Rather than destroying the church, he has become its second-favorite idol (money holds the top spot). He continues to spew increasingly ridiculous statements that, instead of causing the faithful to question, result in funds and adulation pouring into his "ministry."

Anybody have a better theory?

Fundamentalism Analyzed

Walter A. Davis has an excellent, if heavily Freudian, analysis of fundamentalism. As a recent fundamentalist escapee, I can vouch for what he describes, even if I don't agree with the explanation. Quotes that caught my eye:

Literalism

Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep.... It is the great protection against a world teeming with complexities. Literalism offers a way out, a way to keep the mind fixed and fixated at its first condition. The way: the refusal to comprehend anything that exceeds the limits of the simple declarative sentence. Two reductions thereby feed on one another: the world is reduced to facts and simples; the mind reduced to a permanently blank slate.

....

Literalism is a cardinal necessity of the fundamentalist because it guarantees the primary psychological need. For a certitude that in its simplicity puts an end to all doubt, even to the possibility of doubt.

....

Conversion

Fundamentalism is in love with a single and common story it never tires of telling. This story is the key to the nature of the transformation it celebrates and the absolute split that transformation produces.... There can be no questioning, no doubt. For that would be the sign of only one thing-the voice of Satan and with it the danger of slipping back into those ways of being that one has, through one's conversion, put an end to forever.

....

Conversion is the flight from that action [taking on responsibility]. The psyche is safely delivered into the hands of abstraction. One was under Satan's power when one did all those terrible things.

....

Evangelicalism

Evangelicism offers the fundamentalist the only way to sustain the reborn self: by trying to recreate the experience of one's conversion in others in order to reenact an unending exorcism.... [E]vangelical activity is based on a total lack of respect for the minds of those they are trying to convert.

....

Apocalypticism

The world keeps seeping i[n]. There must be a way to be done with it, once and for all. To find what one has craved from the beginning. The end. And a proper end-one that will give sublime expression to the desire that has fed the whole thing. Death. The longing for death transformed into a sublime celebration of death. Life in its complexity demands too much of us. That in a nutshell is the fundamentalist message. Only death can deliver one from the threat life poses. In the depths of its
psyche fundamentalism is ruled by catastrophic anxiety, a self tottering on the brink of a dissolution in which it will fragment imprisoned in a world that will impose all of its terrors and evils upon it. We will fail to understand fundamentalism as long as we resist seeing how close it is to a psychosis.

....

Sexual Roots of the Fundamentalist Psyche

Fundamentalism fixates on sex not by accident or divine decree but by the exigencies of immediate experience.... Sexual pleasure is the temple of a holiness that neither wants nor needs other worlds so completely has it found fulfillment in this one.... Because it poses a comprehensive threat to the fundamentalist project eros must be poisoned a[s] early as possible.

....

What Freud struggled to comprehend Roman Catholicism throughout its history has known instinctively and with a thoroughness that enabled it to raise the whole thing to the level of a system based on the most fundamental of recognitions: that working upon human sexuality is the way to attain complete dominance over the psyche. The systematic perfection of that labor depends on a single insight : wounding someone in their "soul" is the way one gains the greatest power over them; and one does it best when one takes what is most open, vulnerable, and loving in a child and exploits it to forge the bonds that will enslave that psyche, perhaps forever.

I've wondered since the days of my Christian high school education why fundamentalists seem completely obsessed with sex; especially their endlessly fantasizing about homosexuals and what they do in bed. Again, I don't buy the heavy-handed Freudianism in his explanations, but his characterization of fundamentalism is spot on.

I'm Mentally Unbalanced

My employer just stated that I am mentally unbalanced, a danger to myself and my co-workers. I received an e-mail late yesterday that I (and everyone else in the IS department) would be required to attend a violence prevention workshop.

That in and of itself would not be bad, but coming as it does on a year's worth of policy changes (all favor the organization and, in some way, cost employees), it just confirms my decision to be done with this place. I won't even have to quit. All I have to do is refuse to attend the workshops, and I will be fired. Sweet. The world is full of jobs; I have no need or desire to put up with any more bullshit from this place.

Here is the list of changes in just the last year:
Employees are no longer allowed to work from home.
Flex time eliminated.
On-call pay eliminated.
Overtime pay eliminated.
Work loads dramatically increased.

Interspersed in each of these policy changes have been constant requests for me to justify my existence to management. Like any of the retards in management would have a clue what it is I do, even if I spelled it out for them.

Now I'm told I have an anger problem. Really? Ya think?

Religion is Stupid

I can say that religion is stupid with utmost confidence, because for my entire life, I have followed it. Participated in it, immersed myself in it, studied it at Christian school and college, propagated it to our young people. And now I have abandoned it. I still have some deistic notions floating around in my head, but they are not firmly attached. I expect full-blown agnosticism to eventually take root.

According to the church I attend, I will burn in the hottest place in hell, because somewhere in the Bible it says that it will be worse for those that knew The Truth (tm) and walked away than for those that never believed. So be it. If God is so small that my heresy shakes the foundations of Christendom, then he isn't anyone I'm interested in anyway.

If God ever wants me back, he can start by finding a better class of people for spokesmen. I have no idea who Bridget Maher is or what the Family Research Council is, but from their public statements, I don't ever want to know. Yea, Bridget, you self-righteous bitch; I'm sure you are speaking with the love of Jesus when you condemn 3,700 women a year to death. People like you are why I'm gone. People like you are why 80-90% of all kids growing up in evangelical churches are gone. "Culture of Life" my hairy white ass.

Baby Steps

It takes a while to unravel all the threads of 20 years of life. I have been taking the first baby steps over the last week, and damn are there going to be a lot of baby steps. But I have started taking them, and that seems to be the most important point. I've probably asked myself a hundred times, "Do you really want to do this?" Yea, I do.

I'm sure many will think I am nuts, throwing away 20 years of my life. That sort of thinking is why I've lived this life for 20 years instead of calling it quits after two or three. At this point, it feels more like giving up on an old car that is just too broken down to salvage. At some point you have to stop throwing good money after bad. Except I am not throwing away money, I'm throwing away years of my life.

I'm sorry. This just isn't working. No matter how hard I try, you are never happy. I do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, hang with the wrong people, believe the wrong things. We are just destroying each other. It's time to end it.

"Time is the fire in which we burn." From the first ST-TNG movie, if I recall correctly. “Life is short,” I tell myself, “Enjoy it.” I'm not enjoying life. You're not enjoying life. In 20 years, neither of us have enjoyed our life. Life is too short.

Reflections on Work

My previous post got me thinking about work. The short version is "It sucks, and I hate every day that I am stuck here doing this."

A somewhat longer version is that I don't think I am really suited to this kind of work. For one thing, I'm not really interested in finishing anything. Ever. Once something is mostly done, I lose all interest in completing it. In my personal life, I have a half-built cabin, an unfinished house, and half-assed landscaping. Work isn't any better. I have half-finished projects laying all over my desk, and not one wit of motivation to complete any of them. I will have to eventually, or face being fired, but basically, once the outline is done, I'd rather get paid $30/hour to write blog posts, which is exactly what I am doing right now.

I try to at least look organized and industrious. I keep things in neat little piles and have drawers full of file folders. I couldn't tell you what is in about 90% of them and many were simply inherited from my predecessor and have never seen the light of day. But damn do they look impressive. Or at least I hope they do. We've had a lot of emphasis lately on tracking our time so our existence can be justified to upper management. I suck at it mainly because tracking my time hour-by-hour makes it obvious that I suck ass as an employee. I can only account for about half my time on a good day, and even then it is just a bunch of random work done on whatever happens to grab my attention at that particular moment. No planning, no priorities; just pick up a random piece of paper from a random pile, do something with it for a few minutes, get bored, screw around on the internet for an hour, rinse and repeat.

So why do I stick with it? Because nothing else around here pays enough to make the mortgage payments on my (actually, the bank's) half-built house. The bank owns me heart and soul, and I work for them. Nearly every penny I make at this job is spent on transportation to and from work and paying the mortgage. I was perfectly content to live the rest of my life in the cabin. I owed nothing to anybody. Building a house was the second-most boneheaded move I have ever made, and I knew it was before the first shovel of dirt. So why did it happen? I was attempting an impossible task: making a woman happy.

Guys, here's a tip. Never get married. It's a bad deal all around. If you're horny, grab yourself a hooker. You can go way upscale and still be miles ahead financially. Staying single means you have the flexibility to pursue jobs that interest you in places you find pleasant to live in and the option to bail out whenever the job or the scenery gets old. Getting married means being a slave. A slave to every irrational want your wife can dream up in exchange for having to beg for sex three times a year. The biggest want will of course be a house. Not just four walls and a roof with a bed and a shitter, but a palace that can be used to awe friends you don't have and family that hate you and wouldn't darken your door on a bet. Just Say No. Pick up easy girls, get your freak on for a few days, then dump them like a bad habit at the first sign of a second toothbrush in your bathroom. Trust me.

I don't think I need to state what my most-boneheaded move was.

Kill All The Lawyers

Why would any rational human being participate in this kind of shit? Making it clear to someone who is incompetent that they need to pursue other career options is one thing, but this sort of mental piling-on is sickening. I'm a programmer, and I have seen people treated pretty rough when it's clear they padded up their resume to get a job. Bragging about your abilities while failing to deliver will also get you bounced hard. But in 20 years I have never seen anyone treated like this. The degradation of politics over my lifetime makes sense given that our politicians are being pulled from a pool of individuals that thrive in this sort of environment.

A Break from the Past

Maybe it's just midlife crisis or maybe I've just gotten old enough and wise enough to not care about the accumulation of shit and status. Whatever it is, it is time to make a clean break from everything; house, wife, family, church, job. Just say, "Fuck it!" to the whole pile of obligations that never seem to end, never seem to relent for five seconds. I'm not asking for a life of leisure, but rather a life where at least once in a great while, somebody, somewhere does something for me just because they want to show they give a shit about me. Or at least allow me to do something for myself without nagging me about how my time and resources could be better spent meeting your needs and wants.

Anyway, this will be a record of my new life. I know you want to know. Everyone does. Always remember the first motivation of a blogger (according to Scott Adams): the world needs more of ME!! So that's what you will get here; all me all the time.