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Jonathan Vilma, he of the New Orleans Saints and Bountygate, recently tweeted this little gem:

Vilma's Reason Why He Shouldn't Be Suspended

Now, you may not have intended to pay the bounty, and you may not have paid it, but if you made the claim that you would, that, by definition, is placing a bounty on someone. Whether or not you paid, or intended to pay is irrelevant. The result would be the same.

It’s no different than calling in a bomb threat — even if you haven’t actually planted a bomb, and didn’t even intend to, you’re still in a world of shit.

If I were Goodell, I’d suspend his ass for another year for wasting the league’s time and money with a frivilous lawsuit.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Overextended myself by about an hour last night. Was up until 11 p.m., and I’m feeling it today. Clearly, 10 p.m. is my cutoff.

Last night, I got overwhelmed with the garage clutter that’s been building up over the winter, so I buckled down and got the place cleaned and organized, in order to be a lot more efficient about the work I’m plowing away on. I’m of the opinion that environment has a tremendous impact on workflow, and I think the chaotic space I’ve been hammering away in hasn’t helped things. Thus, last night’s hammering away.

Things aren’t 100%, but they’re much improved. I still need to figure out some storage issues, finish the insulation/drywall project, and build some extra workbench space. That’s all in-queue for June and July.

The upcoming “bachelor” weekend will be a great opportunity for making headway on the workload, plus getting some around-the-house projects done.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

So far, the filtering (see my previous post) is going really well. Ideas occur to me, and I scribble them down in the notebook and file the notebook away. I don’t feel bad about it, either. The next four months or so are about establishing a sustainable routine. Once that’s done, I’m going to find 30 minutes a day to work on one project at a time. More, once Eddy’s sleep schedule stabilizes and he starts sleeping through the night.

The sustainable routine is coming along nicely. I’ve calculated my optimum number of hours of sleep (six), which will help me to figure things out. In bed by ten, up by four, and that gives me the time I need to hit the gym in the morning before taking Eddy in to daycare and hitting the office.

I’ve already started noticing effects of these modifications to my daily life. I sleep better, I’m more “in the moment” and less forgetful. I like this.

Away from therapy, things are going well. Work is keeping me busy, but I’m able to let it go when I leave the office. The bike biz feels like I’m back on-track and moving forward in leaps and bounds. There’s some planning in its very early stages for some new equipment, too.

So yeah, life is good. Especially when you’ve got this little guy involved:

"...because it says 'I want to be formal, but I'm here to party.'"

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

As part of my ongoing attempt to simplify my life and reduce my anxiety, I am carving my to-do list to shreds, and aborting my first attempt at the 101 Things in 1001 Days. I accomplished about a quarter of the list, but have come to the realization that it’s just another thing to worry about. All of the items on there are things I would like to accomplish, but I had more ambition than realism, and ultimately, wound up more stressed out about it than satisfied with the results.

I have a lot of great ideas. Tons of them, in fact. But I lack structure, time, and energy to tackle them all. As such a few things need to change:

1. I need to figure out the 3-4 most important things to me. I’ve done this. They are: my family, my career, my health, and Pallas Athena. Those need to be my primary focus right now, and I need to build a structure where the demands of all of them are being met. I believe I can do that.

2. I need to decide if an idea is good “right now” or is something more enduring/fun and worth my time. If it’s the latter, log it, block out some time for it, but not so that it interferes with the four key items above. No time for small/side projects will be allotted until I have the structure/timing around #1 completed. And generally speaking, I don’t foresee a situation in which I can give a particular “great idea” more than 30-60 minutes a day, when looking at the demands of the first item.

Thus, for the next few months, life is going to be about establishing focus and getting into a set and sustainable routine. I suspect that I’ll end up watching less TV, and reading a little less, but I think it’ll still be a good thing. Anything that reduces the anxiety and results in better health is a good thing.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes, the most valuable things come out of the shortest conversations. About two weeks ago, I found a new therapist and went, to discuss some things that were bothering me.

I’ve been accused of depression and attention deficit disorder. I don’t believe I have either of them. Depression is nixed for a lot of reasons, mainly because I don’t have very many symptoms and the ones I do have could be attributed to a lot of other things. ADD/ADHD are nixed because, well, I may not always be in-the-moment, and I might be a bit scatterbrained, but I can certainly sit still and focus on a singular task for long periods (see: reading, movies, writing, programming, work at the office).

Thus, I’ve always been a bit confused by the whole state of affairs. As you can imagine.

So two weeks ago, with new therapist, she threw out the diagnosis of “anxiety.” At first, I laughed, because anxiety? Really? Do I seem anxious? She then countered with everything I’d been recounting with regards to my life to that point, and then pointed out that I’m not in-the-moment because I have a million things in my head at any given time, all that I’m worried about or trying to gear up to tackle.

And it made sense. Holy crap, did it ever. Worry about too much shit, and everything starts coming unglued.

So yeah, next appointment is tonight at 5 p.m. This should be interesting.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Son,

You’ve been home for weeks now, and you’re coming up on four months since your unexpected birth. You’re about to hit two months of age, developmentally speaking, and today you started daycare and your mom went back to work.

Man, your personality and little quirks are starting to show. You’ll be happy to know that you can burp well above your weight/size, and that your farts can clear a room. Lately, though, a few things have started to happen:

• You’re finding your voice and your smile — the latter usually comes up after you utter some nifty vowel sound. We see it a lot in the morning, and today was no different.

• Based on the above, I think you’re going to be a morning person like your dad.

• I have this sneaking suspicion you’re going to be left-handed, just based on your movements. Call it a hunch.

It’s been a wild ride so far.

Love,
Dad

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Man, what a weekend. No, really. Oof. I’m writing this on Sunday night, won’t post it until Monday morning (auto-schedule), but I can tell you how things have gone and will continue to go down through Monday evening.

Friday:
Took a day off of work to spend some extra time this weekend with Kate and Eddy. Pretty relaxing day. Ran a quick errand in the morning (chiropractor), hit Home Depot on the way home for mousetraps, then went with Kate to her haircut appointment, wherein Eddy and I sat in the lobby and he flirted with every girl in the place. I sat off to the side and realized that, yes, truthfully a baby is more effective for meeting women than a puppy. Crazy.

Saturday:
The day of little tasks. Set the mousetraps in the garage. A few days prior, I had found the bag of birdseed chewed open, and a bunch of mouse droppings. Later that night, I saw the little fucker hauling ass along the baseboards while I was in the workshop. Baited them with some asiago and then left them scattered throughout the garage. Hung out with the wife. We went shopping at Capitalism Central (the Mall of America) so Kate could get some work clothes that fit. Eddy threw a wrench into the works and we came home. Not before eating at Rainforest Café, where I took advantage of my newfound absence-of-fish-allergy and ordered the fish tacos, which were underwhelming.

Sunday:
Intense thunderstorms blew through here at about 2 a.m. Hail, strong winds, torrential rain. When I went out to check on everything at around 8:00 a.m., I was legitimately surprised that we had all our siding, screens, and shingles. All the deck furniture was where we’d left it. The yard was pretty sodden, but nothing to worry about. Kate went out to finish her shopping and Eddy and I hung out and watched TV (or I did, anyway — he napped on me). She came home, we ordered pizza. At some point after that, there was a conversation in my head that went something like this:

“I haven’t heard the sump pump in several hours.”
“We should probably check on the crawlspace.”

Then the external conversation portion went: “Oh, fuck!”

On examination, the crawlspace had about three inches of water in it. Fortunately, not enough to overflow the space and flow into the rest of the basement, but still enough for causing concern. After a few hours of monkeying around, I got the sump working again — the float had broken free and would’ve had to float up about four feet to actually get triggered again. Made sure the outflow pipe was clear and the hose extension ran to the side yard as far as it would go, and then manually triggered the pump and let it run for about 30 minutes. The result was a very quickly-drained space. Don’t get me wrong, it was still damp and mushy and the crock was still filling up about every 15 minutes, but I did manage to get the float secured, and now the sump is kicking off every 20-30 minutes. Next steps involve buying, renting, or borrowing a massive dehumidifier to put in the crawlspace (and direct the outflow of it into the crock). Then we need to start seeing about pouring concrete down there.

Monday:
We’re going to be getting up early and getting Eddy to his first day of daycare. I suspect that’s part of the reason I cannot sleep and am still writing this at 11:30 p.m.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

1. Fully fund the most absolutely ridiculous Kickstarter projects I could find. I want to see socially awkward geeks on stage reading terrible poetry while swinging razor sharp swords to a smoke-and-lasers show.
    
2. Build a monument to Schadenfreude. This would probably be a beautifully ornate granite statue of a soaking-wet Goth falling down a flight of stairs. Ambient muzak to be provided by the Cure.
    
3. Space program for under-priviledged meerkats.
    
4. Executive Producer of Law & Order: Des Moines Parking Enforcement
    
5. Hire the Beatles to play my housewarming party. Yes, I know 3/4ths of them are dead. I have a solution. Have you seen Weekend at Bernie’s?

What would you do?

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

1. Write a four- or five-part blog series on how to buy a custom bicycle. Later turn it into a Kindle Single and a downloadable whitepaper over at athenabikes.com.
2. Start doing the One-Minute Life Assessment Form every day. This could be applied to the 101 Things entry about datalogging my life in 2012.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Years: 39
Bicycles: 5
Cats: 5
Children: 1

Strengths Finder 2.0: Ideation/Strategic/Learner/Self-Assurance/Adaptability
StandOut!: Pioneer/Connector
Myers-Briggs: ENFP

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.