Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

I love to check my blog stats. It is the one narcissistic I do. I use the WordPress.com Stats plugin, which gives a nice basic stat shot. Nothing so in depth that it is hard to read, just the basics. It is interesting, because this blog gets a pretty even number of hits regardless of the day of the week. However, my work-related blog hardly ever gets hit on the weekend. So I am guessing that people are using it as a work resource, at least that’s what I like to think.

Gas has dropped below $3/gallon in most of the places in Fredonia. It varies from $2.98 to $3.03 depending on which place you go to. Even though it is nice to see the price drop below that $3 mark it is still outrageous that prices have gone up as much as they have. I filled up Karen’s car today, and it cost $20 more to fill the tank than it did when we got it less than 2 years ago.

I just read an excellent article entitled “The Tyranny of Stuff“. Rather than summarize it, I’ll leave it to you to read the article. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back.

I think that we put too much emphasis on stuff in our lives. As the saying goes “the best things in life aren’t things.” I am guilty of being a former packrat. Former as in I make a conscious effort to not accumulate more stuff, not as in I have already gotten rid of my old stuff. I have a lot of stuff. Stuff I will never use. Stuff I will use once a year, maybe once a decade. Stuff that sits on a shelf. Stuff that sits in a box. Stuff I don’t even know I have. Lately I have been feeling overwhelmed with stuff. But pruning through years of stuff is almost as overwhelming a task as finding a place to put it all. I suppose I am on a good start with trying not to accumulate new stuff. But getting rid of the old stuff is very difficult.

In a bit of tech irony Google deleted one of its own blogs as spam. This is a problem indicative of when robots take over every last detail of an operation, such as Google. If it was a human they would have never have marked it for deletion in the first place. Ultimately it was a human error since a person didn’t email the robot to say please don’t delete me. But if Google didn’t have robots running all of their businesses things like that would not have happened. Do the robots do a good job? Not really. There are still a bunch of spam blogs out there. But, for all that Google wants to do no evil, they are now a public company. So it is good for their stock to make robots do all the work, but bad for the people who actually use their products.

Karen and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl tonight. That was an excellent movie. Although in the epic battle between Pirate vs. Ninja I tend towards ninjas, this movie would make me vote pirate.
An all around entertaining movie, I was happy we watched it and would recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it or watching it again if you have. Now I can’t wait to get the next one from Netflix.

I am getting caught up on my pictures finally. The girls went down to Staten Island for a week in the beginning of July, I just posted some of the pictures from their trip today. This was the longest they’ve been away without Mom and Dad, I think they handled it better than Karen and I did.

Here are the girls “on the radio” at the SI Children’s Museum

Bella took this picture of Gillian, Grandma Cathie, Grandpa Lenny, Uncle Charlie, Aunt Linda, and Cousin Michael. I’m really glad they got to meet my Aunt, Uncle, and Cousin. That’s the one disadvantage to living so far away, we don’t get to see my extended family very often.

Here’s a shot of the girls and Nina having lunch.

We were watching Dora the Explorer tonight, and as she often does Dora put something in her backpack at the beginning of the show and then when she needs it she screams (I don’t think Dora knows how to speak in a normal voice, she is always screaming) Where did I put *random item*? Can you help me find it?
Well tonight Gilli responded “Backpack Dora” with all the inflection and facial expression as if to say “What is wrong with you, Dora? Did you sustain a head injury? It was only 10 minutes ago you put the thing IN YOUR BACKPACK. Why don’t you remember this?”

As the summer progresses I am finding there is just so much work to do that it is easy to feel overwhelmed. So last night I stopped working for a while to do something I’ve been wanting to do since the end of May. When we were in Kentucky I had taken several pictures at the wedding reception that were good pictures but they had a few problems. Red eye, very busy backgrounds, etc. I spent some time cleaning them up and posted them to my Flickr site. I think they turned out pretty well and it is something I like to tinker with.