Daily Life

There are 169 posts filed in Daily Life (this is page 9 of 17).

How to Walk

I took a day off work last week to get some errands done. Among other things, I swung by Pacesetter Athletic in Woodstock to get some instruction on how to use my shoes. That’s right: I needed remedial walking lessons.

I bought my shoes at the beginning of November during the store’s “20% off sale”. The owner helped me find an appropriate pair. “Listen to me,” he said, staring me in the eyes, “I want you to come back. I don’t have time to go over things with you now, but I want you to come back. You need to learn how to use these shoes. You need to learn how to walk.”

The only trouble was the owner wasn’t ever in his shop when I had free time. When I took a day off for other errands, I took the opportunity to drop by. At first he didn’t recognize me, but when he took a look at my old shoes, it all came back to him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “These shoes are crap. Look how they have these ‘air cushions’ in them. It’s all a gimmick. They don’t provide any support. Here — put them on again.”

And so I did.

He led me outside and had me walk back-and-forth. Then he had me jog back-and-forth. “Your feet wobble all over the place,” he told me. “Those shoes are awful. You have no support. Now try on your new shoes.”

I tried on my new shoes. I walked across the parking lot. I jogged across the parking lot. “See?” he said. “Isn’t that better. You were rolling your foot from the outside to the inside. This shoe helps correct that. But you’re still not walking properly. Let me show you how.”

The owner showed me how to walk. “You have to breathe deeply as you walk,” he said, and he made a big swooping motion with his arms, presumably filling up his lungs. “Also, you need to relax your shoulders. Keep your back straight. Keep your butt underneath you. You’re leaning forward like this.”

A light clicked. “Is that why I get shin splints?” I asked.

“Exactly!” he said, leading me inside. “Here, let me write this down for you. On a piece of paper he scrawled:

Checklist — every 5-10 minutes

  1. Breathe deep
  2. Relax shoulders
  3. Back straight
  4. Hip or butt underneath you

Keep BALANCE!!

He also sold me an insert for my shoe, a thick piece of foam with an additional piece of foam glued in place as an arch support. “I want you to try these,” he told me. “I think they’ll help you.”

He sent me on my merry way.

When I got home, I tried the shoes with the new arch support. I started my three-mile route down along River Forest Loop. I could tell there were problems immediately. My feet were cramping, just like they used to. The shoe felt tight. But after a mile of pain, I stopped and removed the arches. Everything was fine.

I walked.

I practiced mindfulness. Every few minutes, I did a mental inventory. Was I breathing deeply? Was I relaxing my shoulders? Was my back straight? Was my butt underneath me?

Mostly, I was able to do all these things. (I have some trouble understanding the “relax shoulders” bit. I feel like I have slouchy shoulders to begin with. Can you get more relaxed than that?) When I had finished the walk, I was pleased to realize that I was not sore. I did not have shin splints. Now I just need to walk more often.

Tales of the Chicken, part six

Rumor has it many of you like the ongoing Tales of the Chicken. I aim to please.

The shop kittens are baffling sometimes.

On most mornings they rush inside when we open the door, jump onto the chair next to the fax machine, and begin to “self-serve” from the open bag of cat food. They continue to graze from the bag throughout the day.

Some mornings, though — including today — they bypass the bag of cat food and trot to the kitchen, hop onto the table, and rummage through the cafeteria supplies. What are they searching for? Cheetos. I have no idea why they like Cheetos so much, but these pigs eat more than the rest of our employees combined.

Today when I came into the office, I could hear them rummaging in the chips. When I went to the kitchen, they had ripped open two bags and were munching away. Cheeto fiends.

(In the afternoon, Max was sprawled on my desk sleeping. Nick had a bag of Cheetos. He snapped Max awake by laying a Cheeto on his paws.)

Meanwhile, another stray cat has appeared. It has long tortoise-shell fur and already has the kittens cowed. When Max or Duke gets too close, the new cat takes him down in a flurry of fur. She moves like lightning, wrestles the kitten for a second or two, then bolts away. The kittens are in a state of shock. Thus far in their young lives, they’ve only encountered benevolence.

The chicken, however, is nonplused, and the new cat ignores it. Yesterday the dumb bird was by the back door begging for food, so I took a cup of cat food out for it. Duke followed us. The new cat was already waiting. When I poured the food into the bowl, the new cat chowed hungrily. The chicken joined her. I tried to put Duke down so he could eat, but he was frightened — not of the chicken, but of the new cat.

Actually, he was probably just craving Cheetos.

Icicle

Days like this — grey, cold, still — sap the warmth from my body. My mind is warm today, active and alive, but my body heat has begun to dissipate. My toes go cold first. I can feel them now, small blocks of ice, and their chill has begun to spread upward, past the soles of my feet, toward my ankels. Meanwhile, my fingers are also cold. My hands are cooling. The tip of my nose is cold. The rest of me is not exactly warm, but not cold yet, either.

In a few minutes, I will drive home. I’ll turn the heat on in the car. I’ll shiver for a few minutes while the air turns warm. But even once I reach Oregon City, when the car has become actually hot, I will not be warm.

No — when I get home, I will grab a book (Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale), climb into the tub, and luxuriate in the warmth. On days like this, I need close, all-encompassing heat, and the tub is the best way to get that. (Though I have discovered that the electric blanket offers another alternative.)

If only chantico were an option. But I’m off sugar right now, so my two remaining bags of the stuff remain in the freezer, untouched.

Update on the Shop Cats (and Chicken)

The Custom Box chicken is getting bolder and bolder. Today as I was unloading the stuff from Costco, the chicken marched up to the back door and demanded to be fed. Since the cat have learned to self-feed from the bag, we’re not good at making sure food gets set out for the bird. This makes the bird unhappy.

So I scooped up a bowl of cat food and let the chicken lead me to her dish under the garden shed. Jeff put away the picnic table while I was on vacation, so I sat on a bench and waited while the chicken eyed me warily. She clucked her disapproval, but she eventually strutted over to have a snack. She wouldn’t let me pet her. She was also nervous of Duke, who had come out to see what I was doing.

Duke and Max have turned into a pair of fine animals. It’s been a long time since we had shop cats, and we’d forgotten how fun it is. These two are especially good.

Max has developed several passions:

  1. He likes to eat, especially fresh from the bag.
  2. He likes to play with bottle caps of any sort — they can amuse him for hours.
  3. He likes to race. Jeff calls him the “grey cheetah”.

Duke, meanwhile, just wants to be loved. He likes nothing more than to curl up on somebody’s chest or lap. (In fact, he is currently sprawled on my lap, keeping me warm as I type this.) He’s also finally lost the annoying habit of constantly licking my fingers. Duke is Master of Doors: he knows how to push open any door that’s even partly open. (At home, Toto is even better — she can pull open any door that isn’t fully latched. She does it just for fun.)

I still worry that the cats will venture too close to the road, though I’ve never seen any sign of this. They do have a bad habit of hanging around in the gravel parking area, greeting everyone in the morning. (They follow us to the back door of the office, and as soon as we open it, they race inside to eat from the bag.)

I’d still bring both cats home in a second, if Kris would let me. I’d even bring home the chicken.

Complaints of a Boxmaker

I enjoyed the recent AskMetafilter discussion about common pet peeves for different professions. I was reminded of it again this morning when I received YET ANOTHER REQUEST from our webmail form looking for us to make one box for somebody in New York.

sigh

Why does this bug me? Because there’s no way in hell that having us manufacture one box for somebody across the country is worthwhile for anyone involved. The customer pays more. We make less. It’s lose-lose. Why do we make less? Because it takes more time to deal with the person, we have to go out of our way to ship the box, and the likelihood for error and misunderstanding is higher. I hate shipping cross country so much that I’ve posted the following at the Custom Box Service website, right above the quote request form:

We will not respond to out-of-area quote requests. If you are not located in Oregon or Southwest Washington, you should find a box manufacturer closer to you. Google is your friend.

But still I get several requests a week to make 20 boxes for somebody in Georgia or Vermont or South Carolina. We get more of these requests than real leads. (We get maybe one new local customer a month off the form.)

In the AskMetafilter thread, I shared other pet peeves:

  • People who call and ask for a box using only one or two dimensions. "I need a 27-inch box." or "I need a box that’s a 12 by 12 square." I’m sorry. Boxes, exist in a three-dimensional universe, actually have three dimensions. I’m shocked at how many times I have to ask, "What’s the third dimension?" only to be met by baffled silence or by an "I don’t know".
  • People who call wanting a price quote, but who do not have a pen to write the numbers down. These are the very same people who call two weeks later swearing that I’ve quoted them a much lower price. I have a hardcopy of every price quote I’ve generated. Write the prices/specs down!
  • People who need their boxes in a rush (which is everyone), but who then say, "Oh, can I pick those up next Wednesday?" Or worse yet, people who make me rush to make boxes but then are slow to pay.
  • People who want me to be able to manufacture a box to tolerances less than +/- 1/8 inch. I just had somebody request something in 64ths of an inch yesterday. Dream on.
  • People who complain about price increases. Paper is a commodity. Its price fluctuates all the time. I have no control over that. I’m not jacking up prices to rip you off. My prices go up when my costs go up.
  • People who call up the day they need to ship their Whatzit to Aunt Madge. "It has to be to the post office by three." Well you should have called earlier, then. I can’t violate the laws of physics.
  • People who have to tell me their life story in order to convey what sort of box they need. I don’t care about your cousin Billy. Just tell me what size of box you need and how many.

Basically, my list of complaints can be boiled down to one central problem: stupid people. (Don’t I sound like a jerk?)

The real trouble is, when I have to call business for help (a locksmith, for example), I’m the one who sounds like an idiot…

Found on Road, Dead

Ah, my lovely Ford Focus. For years I drove it begrudgingly. Then I performed a little revitalization on it, and found it to be acceptable. I also discovered the overdrive switch, which would bump its power from gutless to “a little more than gutless”. I could live with a little more than gutless.

I’ve driven it for the past year with only a few complaints.

But this morning I walked out to the car, put my bag in the back seat, and tried to start the ignition. It wouldn’t start. The key wouldn’t even turn. I jiggled the wheel. Nothing. I pumped the brake. Nothing. I shifted through all the gears. Nothing. I got out the manual — no sign of any such problem.

After fifteen minutes, I came inside and google the problem. Lo and behold! People all over the place have experienced the same thing, but Ford insists it’s not an issue. Shocking.

Here are just a handful of sits where people have discussed this “non-issue”:

Once my insurance agent and car dealership opened, I began to call around to determine the best course of action. The dealership actually didn’t want to have anything to do with it, if at all possible, so I called a locksmith.

“I checked on the internet,” I told the young man who came to work on the vehicle. “This seems to be a common problem with Focuses.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s a common problem with all newer Fords. It happens all the time.”

The fellow spent twenty minutes working on the ignition. I brewed myself some hot chocolate and ate some toast. When he was finished, he had me try inserting the key. It was still fairly stiff. He told me to be sure I was inserting the key straight. He also recommended I get a new set of keys.

“You’ve got 90,000 miles on this, which is pretty good,” he said. “Usually I see these fail before 60,000 miles. I do about ten of these a week.”

Ten a week. And yet Ford doesn’t seem to think this is worthy of a recall.

The New Frugal J.D.

I made some changes to this site’s RSS feed the other day. Could somebody who reads foldedspace via RSS please leave a comment (or e-mail me) so that I can verify things still work? Just a ping is fine.

Here’s an entry I’m able to post to three different weblogs! You gotta love that…

Rhonda called this morning. “There’s a garage sale near me where a guy is selling old comic books. They’re from the seventies. You might want to come take a look.”

I did want to take a look, though I knew it was dangerous business. One key to managing your money is to avoid temptation. It’s foolish to purposefully put yourself into a position where you’re likely to spend.

And yet I drove to the garage sale to look at the comics books.

I’ve collected comics since I was a boy. I used to collect the actual magazines, buying them at grocery stores and bookshops. I grew out of them in high school, and in 1989 I sold my entire collection for $100 to a comic book store near my university. I needed the money to take a girlfriend on an expensive date. (The collection I sold included many fine runs, including all of Miller Daredevil, most of the “new” X-Men, all of Marvel Star Wars — basically all the cool stuff from the late seventies and early eighties when I had been actively collecting.)

Most garage sale comics are woefully overpriced. People ask $5 for a common-as-dirt mid-nineties Batman, for example. Nobody’s going to pay that. But the garage sale I drove to today was different. The seller had two boxes of mid-seventies Marvel comics, all of which were priced at about $2 an issue.

He had Amazing Spider-Man from about 115-145. He had Fantastic Four from about 130-160. He had Incredible Hulk from about 180-200. He had various issues of Avengers, X-Men, Captain America, and Daredevil. There was a lot of great stuff here, and two years ago I would have offered $100 for as much as the seller would let me take.

I didn’t do that today. Today I leafed through both boxes, thanked the man, and left. Why? Two reasons:

  1. I no longer collect the comic magazines themselves. I collect comic compilations.
  2. I’m a better money manager than I was two years ago.

Would I have liked to have these comics? Absolutely. They would be great fun to read, especially since most won’t be collected in reprint volumes for another five or ten years, if ever. But I can’t keep up with the comics I buy currently. I’m thinking of cutting back to collecting only comic strip compilations. And there are other things I’d like buy with that money. (MacBook Pro, anyone?)

In the end, I only spent a few dollars in gas to drive to the sale and back: a victory for the new frugal J.D.

Skinflint on Vacation

This is the first vacation I’ve taken since developing a frugal mindset. It’s tough for me to let loose. My pennypinching ways are causing me pain.

For example, we drove to San Francisco because (a) I love to drive, and have never had a chance to do a long trip like this; (b) having our own car would allow us greater flexibility; and (c) I believed it would save us money. (We’ll tally expenses at the end to see if it really did so.)

However, as soon as we arrived at the hotel I was greeted by a rude slap in the face: we must pay $32/night in parking! This had never even crossed my mind. I’m a hick at heart, and hicks never pay for parking. This setback is going to cost us 6.4% of our vacation budget. That’s basically the equivalent of a hotel stay on the drive home. (We’re driving back up the California and Oregon coasts.) This made me sulky until Kris pointed out how ridiculous I was being. There’s nothing we can do about the cost, and we can afford it, so we should just roll with it. It’s a bummer, yes, but what can we do?

We’ve exercised our frugality muscles in other areas.

We packed some fruit and water and snacks from home so that we didn’t have to stop along the way. These snacks will also stand us in good stead so that we can avoid paying for breakfast. To save a little money, we fueled up and ate lunch in Ashland. (There’s no sales tax in Oregon.)

Aside from the Parking Debacle, I had one other minor case of non-frugality. I was drowsy while driving, so we pulled into a rest stop to get some caffeine. I could have had a Coke for a buck, but I decided to try a Red Bull energy drink. There was no price listed on the vending machine, so I assumed they were also a buck. Bad assumption. The machine took my dollar and asked for $1.50 more. Holy cats! I pressed the coin return, but no luck. It wouldn’t refund my money. I threw good money after bad and ended up with a $2.50 beverage. (Which, fortunately, did its job: it woke me up.)

Today we join Kris’ family for a touristy exploration of San Francisco. I’m surprised at how overwhelming it is. I don’t have much experience outside Portland and, especially, its rural towns. San Francisco is big. And cosmopolitan. And a little intimidating. (Yet very, very exciting.) It feels sort of European, actually. My goal is to forget about the $32 parking and just have fun. And stay frugal.

Addendum: Kris notes that I’ve also been flustered by tipping. When we travel, we normally stay in motels. Because we’re traveling with her parents — and because this hotel is being subsidized by inheritance money — we’re staying someplace a little nicer. People keep doing things for us. Some guy parked our car. Do I tip him? I don’t know. I asked the woman at the front desk, and she seemed offended that I had asked. Faux pas piled upon faux pas. Fortunately, I did know how to tip the bellhop — one-dollar a bag, right?

J.D. the Duck

“Lieberman lost,” Kris told me today.

“Lost what?” I asked.

She fixed me with her gaze, shook her head, then ambled upstairs. “Lost what?” I called after her.

“I’m going to watch the news,” she muttered.

I went upstairs to watch the news with her. Apparently Joe Lieberman, Democratic Senator from Connecticut, lost a primary election. Connecticut has primaries in August? What are they smoking over there? “So what?” I said. “Who cares?”

“I’m not talking to you,” she said. I watched the rest of the Lehrer News Hour with her, and my questions were answered. Then I went downstairs to take a bath.

Kris came downstairs as I was soaking (and reading an article in Men’s Journal about the twelve greatest sports cars of all time). She pulled back the shower curtain and stared at me (and my fleshy lumps). “You know what the difference between you and Celeste is?” she asked. Celeste is her good friend and co-worker.

I thought for a moment. “I’m happy?” I said, hoping that was the right answer. I snuck a peak at the Corvette pictured in the article.

“No,” she said. “The difference between you and Celeste is that when I said to her this morning, ‘Lieberman lost,’ her reply was, ‘Omygod — are you kidding? How do you think this will affect the upcoming elections?’ When I said to you, ‘Lieberman lost,’ your reply was, ‘Lost what?’ That’s the difference between you and Celeste.”

I half-listened, half-read a great run-down on a classic Jaguar. “Huh,” I said. “I thought you were going to say the difference was that I was happy.”

“You know what? A duck is happy. A duck! A duck walks around all day oblivious to what’s going on in the world. That’s what you are: a duck. You’re a duck.”

I tossed my magazine onto the floor and slid back into the warm water. “Quack quack,” I said. Kris sighed and left the room.

We’re leaving for San Francisco in the morning. We won’t return for a couple weeks. I hope to be able to post while I’m gone, but no promises. Maybe we should have paid the housesitter to write weblog entries, too…

Too Tired to Sleep

I’m trying to recover from Blogathon by sleeping in this morning, but it’s difficult.

For one thing, it’s light outside. I have an eyemask, but the light still seeps through.

For another, I had a hell of a lot of caffeine last night. My body is shaking.

Plus there’s the fact that Tiffany got the keys to her house last night and wants to move today. She’s scheduled everything very tight so that there’s no margin for error. And yet the movers are providing error. Kris says they’re not able to mover her today for some reason. Now they’re just running late. She could use my help!

The cats aren’t co-operating either. I’d been sleeping for a couple of hours when Kris came into the bedroom. “Hon, wake up. You have got to see this.” What I had got to see was Simon, outside the bedroom, sitting on the balcony. We have no idea how he got there. “He was sitting on the planter box outside the kitchen,” Kris said, “and then the next thing I knew he was on the roof of the front porch. And then he was here.” We wrestled with the balcony screen (it’s large, and sharp, and cumbersome) until we had it free, and then Simon just stood up, looked at us, and traipsed into the house. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.”

And, finally, now that I’ve finished pouring my soul into Get Rich Slowly, I want to spend a couple hours putting the finishing touches on Animal Intelligence and spend a few hours getting Four Color Comics back in shape.

But what I really need to do is sleep.