Category: Philosophy

June 27, 2022 – Back to Reality

June 27, 2022 /

It is strange sitting in the Barcelona airport and typing this message. We are about board the plane for the first leg home. I had all of my posts staged for the last week and a half (with the exception of last Tuesday’s). So, I haven’t given much thought to the beginning of the work week.

So much of my future has been pegged to this trip. It seems like everything was categorized as ’Needs to Get Done Before’ or ’Needs to Wait Until After’. Now, the trip is over, so there is only what comes next. For instance, It is truly time to get to work on my siding project before I actually run out of summer.

I am sure I will probably talk about my trip most of the week, so I don’t have to get it all in today. Plus, I am in kind of a mental fog right now. I don’t know exactly how to name it, but I will attempt to describe it. It is not a hangover, that is the next day pain from the party. It is not the intoxication from the trip, I guess that I would call it the afterglow? You just want to be and nothing really else.

I don’t always feel like every vacation is over. I suppose that it is more like the vacation never started. Maybe it is a function of the duration of the time and maybe distance. In this case, having 10 days in Spain is probably enough time and disconnection from reality that it worked. In contrast, my last day off was a drive to Texas and back in a week. That was definitely not relaxing.

I don’t know if there is a proper formula for a successful. It very well could be different for each person. I know for me, I don’t want to just lay by the pool or in the sand. However, I don’t know if a constant touring format is enough downtime. This vacation had a bit of each.

I was able to finish my pretty substantial book “The Lost Symbol” on the trip as well as see Barcelona multiple days. If I had full control of the itinerary, I probably would have tried to take advantage of the fact that this was my first time in Spain and try to see as much as possible like it was my one opportunity. But, in retrospect I think leaving something for later as well as not filling every minute made it successful.

I am a creature of habit. My days are filled with doing the same things every day. I listen to my podcast list, I check my usual blogs, social media, news and information aggregators. None of these things I did on the trip. The instinctual part of me wants to catch up but a larger part of me want’s to leave it where it lies. That is probably part of a successful vacation as well. It is so difficult for me but probably worth it.

End Your Programming Routine: A lot of this I wrote before we got home. I definitely had some major surprises when we got home. However, I am not going to take today down with those specifics. Let me just say, it was definitely back to reality on Sunday and hopefully another trip to Spain someday.

June 20, 2022 – The Rain In Spain

June 20, 2022 /

The first time I ever heard this phrase was in Steven King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. If I remember correctly, the main character Roland recites these words as a poem.

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
There is joy and also pain
but the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Pretty-plain, loony-sane
The ways of the world all will change and all the ways remain the same
but if you’re mad or only sane
the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
We walk in love but fly in chains
And the planes in Spain fall mainly in the rain.”

I didn’t know the origins of the lyrics, I think I read the book in middle school or high school. I thought it was unique to the book when one day I heard my grandfather utter the phrase. We were working on a rental house and it started raining and then he said, “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain”.

I never asked him, but I am pretty sure he was not a reader of Steven King. He read a lot of other things like National Geographic, the newspaper, the Bible, the Catechisms, Reader’s Digest, etc. It made me think that there was another source. But, this was the time that was pre-internet so research was not so easy to do. I kind of forgot about it until I was think about our trip to Spain.

It turns out, it was referenced in the 1938 film Pygmalian and subsequently published in 1956 for My Fair Lady. I am no old movie/musical/theater buff. So, I haven’t seen either but I am sure that is where he picked it up. This would have been in the early 1990s.

From my research, it appears that King changed the words so I guess if you get past the first stanza, you wouldn’t recognize it. To me, it sounded kind of like gibberish in the first place. It’s probably a book that I could re-read and get more out of it. I don’t remember a lot of it anyway. But reading the plot summary again, it said that King re-wrote it in 2003 because he thought it was difficult to understand and follow. I kind of agree and I think that is why I don’t remember much of it.

There was a movie made in 2017. From that plot summary, it was a combination of two books (in the five book series). So, the phrase was not in the original play, but in the subsequent movie, then changed by King in his books which have movies combining books together. No wonder I don’t know what is going on.

End Your Programming Routine: Coming from very temperate Oregon, we have not had any rain in Spain. It got up to near 90 at the end of April but we have been seeing highs in the low sixties lately. It is nice to get a taste of summer on our vacation.

June 15, 2022 – Spain Bound

June 15, 2022 /

I know, security experts say not to broadcast your absence over the internet. To that, I say that is good advice particularly for social media. But, either the people closest to us know that we are going or people on this site do not know precisely where we live. It is not that the house is going to be empty anyway.

Today, we are off to eight days in Spain (plus two travel days). I am probably going to do some degree of writing ahead here. But, I don’t think I will do eight days worth. I may opt to post some while I am travelling, but that is not likely. What I am saying is… be prepared for a gap.

This is an important trip. For one thing, the airplane tickets were almost $2000 a piece. This is my first vacation since 2019. Not that taking two years off wasn’t restful, it definitely was. This is my kid’s first time in Europe and leaving the continent. This will be all of our first time in Spain.

We are going to visit our exchange student and his family. We are going to stay pretty close to Barcelona except for a couple days in Majorica with no real agenda. We will see the sights in Barcelona, but most of it is going to be seeing the beach and re-connecting.

There is some anxiety on for the trip as well. From what I have read, for entry we need a passport and a vaccine card within the last 270 days. In order to come home, we will need a Covid test to be negative. I really don’t know what the mask situation or anything like that is currently.

End Your Programming Routine: I don’t want to dwell on the potential negatives. I am looking forward to taking some time off and an adventure. I am sure I will get some content out of this so, look forward to some insight from Spain later in the month. Until then, I am off!

June 3, 2022 – 500

June 3, 2022 /

This is the 500th post at Altf4. I have to say, I don’t think all of them were great and to some degree not all of them were (technically) real topics. There have been some occasions where I was having technical problems and just posted an update rather than a real topic. But, technically, this is the 500th blog entry.

My favorite things I have done so far are the series posts. I think number one was documenting the remodeling of my apartment in the spring and summer of 2020. I do look back at those posts sometimes when I want to check on some aspect or find a picture of the project. Number two was the analysis of 1984 followed by the analysis of the American Dream I completed earlier this year.

Individual posts that stand out to me as favorites are Lessons Delivering for Amazon, Memories of my Grandfather and teens and grief. There are lots of runner ups, particularly ones that I think have great pictures like my fishing, crabbing ones. I suppose the reason that all of those appeal to me is that they hold memories versus the opinion pieces. There is no real connection to the content.

What are the top questions I get asked? The truth is none. But, let’s pretend that I had fans I was being interviewed?

  1. How do you come up with topics every day? I think it is helpful to have a bit of a formula. For instance, a series is useful in filling at least a day a week. Tacticool Thursday is a set placeholder and so I only need three days worth of topics at this point. I use projects on the weekend to generate content for the remaining days. When I get ideas, I stub them out to be filled in later as well.
  2. What is your favorite part of writing AltF4? I like the creative outlet but it also helps me solidify my thoughts. When I was in a funk six weeks ago, writing about it helped me figure out what was going wrong. It also gives me pause
  3. What is your least favorite part? I think because I do this on my own time, the quality and scale of what I do is less than what I want it to be. When I am writing heavy opinion pieces, I will often let them set a day or so before re-reading and publishing. Usually I don’t change much but I often see places where I wander or could streamline the argument. Because of time, I usually let them go. I would like to do larger and more intricate projects but time is usually a constraint.
  4. Is there anything that you wish you hadn’t written about? No. But I do wonder sometimes if I come off too strong at times. I do give some thought to opinion pieces and wonder how this is going to come back to harm me in the future. I often take a second look at my initial stance before I write about it or at least publish it.
  5. If you could make one change, what would it be? I wish that AltF4 was my career. There are lots of things I would like to do that I don’t feel like I have the luxury of doing without sacrificing all of my free time. I would like to build some other avenues of interaction, maybe some e-commerce store with stickers, I would like to refresh some of the sticky pages and organize some additional resources and links.
  6. Any plans for the future? As of right now, nothing new is planned. This doesn’t mean that I won’t change my mind or find an easier way to make the changes I would like to see happen occur. As I have stated recently, doing things the way that I have been doing them has satisfied me to the point that it is comfortable.
  7. Is there anything that you have learned doing this? Actually, I have learned quite a bit. I think I have the discipline to write a book if I wanted to, and I actually enjoy it. I have learned a little about PHP, SSL and web technology as well. I learned that I like having an open forum to do whatever I want to do.
  8. Is there anything else that you want to add? I would like to thank my fans for submitting the questions and letting me answer them. Honestly, I know that this is a passé medium just like reading books or preparing family dinner every night. I guess that I am an old soul. Thanks for giving me your time not just today but every time you read.

I know that growth requires change. In my head at least, I thought I was practicing what I thought was a proper business practice. And that is, keep generating content while the conversion to the new thing is going on. I suppose the reality is that I don’t have the bandwidth to really do both. I get kind of irritated when somewhere closes down temporarily to make a change. My thinking was, I don’t see anything wrong with the way it is. This is the reality of a one man show.

As a result of trying to do something extra for post 500, I have spent some time over the last couple weeks to revamp the static pages. I have consolidated the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Book Club to one page instead of a yearly page. I repurposed the other pages for umbrella subjects of media and influences. Hopefully, those pages will be a little more evergreen and useful and less temporal than they were in the past.

So, with that, I am not going to make any additional promises on the future at this point. I am going to keep writing until I decide to do something different. That something could be that I just don’t want to spend my time doing this anymore. But, I don’t really foresee that at this point.

End Your Programming Routine: It is no secret that I am a routine listener to The Survival Podcast. In one of Jack’s many business building routines, the advice is to do things routinely. Very few are going to show up to something that has five entries or episodes and post randomly. I took that advice to heart, so that part I have down. What I still need lots of help on is the marketing and monetization components.

May 16, 2022 – Another Tough Week

May 16, 2022 /

I had about 80% of Friday’s post written but couldn’t quite get it over the hump before I ran out of time. I will do my best to use it this week. But, I have another long week ahead. I am not making any promises.

I would be remiss not to mention that summer is approaching quickly. For myself, I have one month before we are off for a family vacation to Spain. I will be away for ten days on that trip. That will put us into July and I will need to spend between July and August working on my summer project.

Summer is always a super busy time. I addition to what I am planning to focus, there are other activities like Boy Scout camp, gardening, family gatherings. Don’t forget, there could be be a funeral thrown in there at any time. What I am trying to say is that as busy as I am with work, there are certainly opportunities to accelerate everything outside of that as well.

End Your Programming Routine: I will do my best to keep up. Ideas keep popping up all the time. I keep taking pictures and building a war chest of ideas. I am sure that the volume of things that will happen over the summer will generate plenty of material for the coming months. I hope that I can keep my head above water.

May 9, 2022 – Lots of Content, Little Time

May 9, 2022 /

I am going to be proactive and anticipate that I am going to have a difficult time keeping up this week. Last week I worked six out of seven days and put in twelve hours a day, plus family, plus everything else going on. What helped me was that I got a head start on the weekend and I had all of my posts written before mid-week.

This last weekend, I did not have the same time to get a head start on writing. Between Mother’s Day and travel all day Sunday, I just didn’t have enough free time. I am going to have five long days of work as well.

End Your Programming Routine: This isn’t about excuses, it is about covering my bases if I don’t get anything else published. I have planned talking about my keg experience, how my chronograph work has been going, lessons about maskless travel, observation in my plant starts and my new reading list. So, it is not lack of ideas that are going to cause me problems this week.

April 29, 2022 – Keeping It Light, If You Can Call It That

April 29, 2022 /

With the recent death of Gilbert Gottfried there was a special relationship between him and Norm Macdonald. Both were more comics than actors despite participating in both worlds.

Me, I was never really interested in Gilbert. But, because of the connection to Norm, my YouTube suggestions have spiked since his death. I find myself watching 10 or 15 minutes a night before I ultimately decide I have better things to do.

It was fifteen years ago or so, I used to listen to stand-up on XM radio. I probably had it on for several years straight. I mostly listened to the rated R station, ‘Raw Dog’ because I think that what makes good comedy is pushing the boundaries. It is not that clean comedy can’t be funny, but I find that often it seems like it doesn’t push the boundaries as the dirtier brand.

My wife and I have attended multiple stand-up shows throughout the years. Actually the last one we saw was at a church called Date Night Out. It was Valentine’s Day but it was a little hard for me to enjoy because I had a fever and was the beginning of what was being sick for weeks. I do remember laughing.

Now that I think about it, the statement above was not exactly true. We saw a local act at the Elk’s lodge a two weeks ago. So, I guess that it is safe to say that I like comedy. It just so happens that Norm Macdonald is my particular breed of wackiness. I loved his deadpan, looked you straight in the eye and tell a tale that is unbelievably ridiculous all the while keeping a straight face. That being said, it is also funny when they get 90% of the way through and loses it too.

I like the idea of comedy on Fridays because it breaks the tension of a stressful week and sends the weekend off on a light and positive note. I had visions of writing unique and funny things on Fridays but it takes a lot of time and energy to have that level creativity. Maybe I should be linking to things that make me laugh during the week? I also liked doing my book reviews on Friday’s as well so maybe I will vasilate, we will see.

This week, I am going with the former.

I know that this is not some of Norm’s best work but it is some of his last work and it is topical. It is interesting to look at comedies’ view of Corona Virus at the beginning of it as compared to now. My, how things have gone full circle.

In my liberal arts education, I learned that the genesis of humor is actually tragedy. When you read Romeo and Juliet, it is historically categorized as a tragedy. The story line and outcome are the tragedy, but a large part of the dialogue is comedy. I think that a large reason Shakespeare’s work is revered is that he was able to entertain the masses by ‘sneaking’ in a serious subject or moral juxtaposition.

Humor is a coping and healing mechanism. After the week I have had, I need some humor. My brother has gone through an analogous type situation as mine, our spouses mother’s needing third party care and the family drama surrounding it. We spoke last night and are nearly identically aligned on our feelings and outlook despite not ever really talking about it. Along the way, we had a lot of laughs about the situation. What can you do?

End Your Programming Routine: I know that a super majority of my work has been serious. It doesn’t mean that laughter and humor isn’t a huge part of my life. Happiness is smiling and smiling is from having fun and laughter is a big part of that. However, I know that I need to make a bigger effort to utilize and develop that side of me. I will keep working on that.

April, 18 2022 – I Am Starting To Get a Picture

April 18, 2022 /

Maybe this will be ‘My Therapy Mondays’ . Just kidding, but I have been thinking a lot about how to identify my funk. Like I talked about last week, I know that it is largely about all the things I need to do but don’t want to and all the things I want to but shouldn’t because of the former.

What you are looking at is my path from the garage door opening into the interior of the garage. As I wrote about quite a bit in the fall, I expended a lot of energy getting rid of everything both in the garage and the basement. There are some obvious questions that come up. How did this happen? What are your waiting for to get started?

And, I suppose the answers are just as complicated. But, this is a delicate situation. For some reason, my wife has a constant need to buy new furniture and re-organize the living areas. It seems like a constant evolution of lamps, couches, rugs, chairs and other home furnishings. For instance, the bar stools in the picture were $800 a piece. It annoys me that they are replaced by some much less durable stools (one has already broken and it has been less than two months). I have accepted that the barstools will not come back but I feel like they are still well made and probably selling them could help offset the cost of the constant evolution. That means keeping them around and in my way.

I have made multiple trips to the recycling center in the last couple of months. Every one of the new furnishings show up with boxes and Styrofoam and packaging material. Not only is the process expensive but it is very wasteful. In our locality, the ability to recycle is pretty limited which means I have a large volume of things that cant fit into weekly trash can. For me, a minimum dump load is a full pick-up and trailer otherwise I am just wasting more money. So, I am holding onto that stuff until there is enough to make the trip.

I am not denying the carpet in the kids rooms were bad. They were bad when we moved in sixteen years ago. Along with the new carpet came new furniture, new beds, new linens etc. During the room clearings a lot of extra junk was identified as no longer necessary. There were clothes that will not be worn, garbage like old school work, toys that have been outgrown, etc. That all got piled up in the garage.

Also, in the back of picture you can see my son’s go-cart. He is actively working on it. My problem with this is that there are tools, cords and junk spread out everywhere. I feel like he does not respect the space or my stuff. I made him twice over the last weekend go and put stuff away. By my estimation, I think that he did about two thirds of it. And, when he is cutting and grinding, it is showering grit and stuff all over the furniture that is supposed to be donated.

There is also a contingent of items that came as a result of moving my mother-in-law into the small house in the back. By my read, they are also junk but then they are not my things to dispose of (yet).

End Your Programming Routine: I am starting to get the picture that maybe I have a marriage problem and probably a me problem. Of course I want my wife to be happy but I simply don’t want to be around all the things that I don’t agree with. I don’t want to have to climb over things and step on metal and move wheels out of the way to get to the freezer to get ready for dinner. I don’t know when or where this will end because this round of decorating is not done yet. This is the reason I haven’t started taking action yet. This will pass, in the meantime I am avoiding my garage and shop.

April 1, 2022 – Marking Another April Fool’s Day

April 1, 2022 /

Along with Festivus, this might be in the AltF4 collection of recognized holidays. In tradition, I am supposed to play a prank on you guys. However, I have never been into playing practical jokes. I suppose it is my one areas of empathy.

I like jokes but not so much pranks. I think the difference is the physicality. When I was in college, some of the guys thought it was funny to pretend to trip and dump an entire 32oz drink all over you. It only happened to me a time or two, so no big deal but it wasn’t so fun for the person getting drenched with soda. About ten years ago, one of my coworkers bought donuts and injected them with horseradish (or something). I was out of town that day so I missed that one.

A few years ago, my wife played several tricks on my sons. She froze the milk in the cereal bowl (and a couple of things I cant remember). That triggered one of my sons to go whole hog on April Fools. Two years ago, he setoff some kind of stink bomb in our room in the middle of the night and then tried to saran wrap the door. It didn’t fully work but the prank was definitely not appreciated.

I could probably go for some kind of hidden camera ‘What Would You Do?’ type prank. Not a prank, but some kind of skit, sketch or otherwise unusual public behavior would be funny by me. Alternatively the video below has very harmless pranks. We have tons of videos of pranks and examples. It was one of the premises of America’s Funniest Videos.

End Your Programming Routine: The thing for me is that both parties should be able to laugh. Waking up to a house of burning sulfur for hours is not my idea of a good prank. In the end, you know your friends and family and yourself. So, maybe they like getting a 32oz soda dumped on them but I doubt it. Have fun and let me know what you come up with.

March 29, 2022 – The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

March 29, 2022 /

I tried to do some research on the origin of the phrase and I couldn’t really suss out the meaning. I was trying to derive the significance of the Camel to the phrase. I did find out that this idiom has a long history which dates back to the 1700s and it has several variations from straw to feather and camel to donkey. It would appear that this is indicating a load bearing animal and it is one item too much.

Originally, I thought that I was going to title this the ‘fall that broke the camel’s wrist’ as a play on words for reasons that will become obvious later in this post. I was thinking that the camel was a stubborn animal and that it was more than just a plain, gruesome act. But it doesn’t seem so.

To say the least, this has been a difficult time since my father-in-law has died. I have written about this a little bit and for obvious reasons, not explicitly. To state it bluntly, my mother-in-law is dying, not capable of caring for herself and refusing to accept the situation. This has caused a strained relationship with her children and has driven wedges between my own marriage.

This is just a small flavor but she paid a down payment on a puppy. The children all agreed that this is a bad idea. My wife even spoke to the owner of the puppy not to sell the dog to a person that is living in a travel trailer and cannot walk more than a few yards un-assisted. I am sure we can all use our heads on what the possible problems are here. This lead to a huge blow-up where my wife blocked her mom and I had to become the middleman in constant conversation for two weeks. The words were nasty and hurtful.

That situation came to an end two weekends ago. They were all supposed to stay in a beach house for a week. My wife wanted nothing to do with her. My sister-in-law and her family didn’t want anything to do with her. I was supposed to drive my mother-in-law to the beach house but I couldn’t get ahold of her. A few hours later, I got a call that she had fallen and possibly broke her wrist. She was in the ER, already at the coast.

I told my wife and she unblocked her to communicate in the situation. They ended up spending the planned four days at the beach but that wasn’t easy either. I had multiple phone calls about how my mother-in-law was behaving and I don’t have words. I prayed.

I am not claiming to have a command of the best Christian behavior. Quite frankly, I would just as soon not have anything to do with her either. It would make my life a lot easier. But, that is not the way of Jesus. I certainly didn’t want to be the middleman or even try to get deeper into the situation. But, this is a time of need and our my beliefs would tell me to forgive the sinner.

I think that the broken wrist has made a thaw in the relationship. For one thing, we moved her into our apartment last weekend. The travel trailer is getting moved before the first and it will likely be her last night there. I haven’t had a direct conversation specifically, but I think it was a wakeup call that today is the best day that there will be.

Fifteen years ago, before podcasts I used to listen to Dave Ramsey a lot. One of his recommended books was Boudaries. I never got around to reading this book but I maybe it is not too late. I think we could all use some help in this situation.

End Your Programming Routine: From my observation, this is the reverse of raising a teen. They are trying to resolve the desire to become more grown-up and yet not quite ready. This situation is trying to get the person to realize that they cannot do the things they did even a year ago. It is hard and we have no legal standing to stop it in most cases. Keep all of us in your prayers.