I Tried It And....

....I'm not sure how I feel about it. Yoga, that is. I've seen it on the Y class schedule, and upon the glowing recommendations of Jen and Beth, I've been meaning to try it. Well, tonight I did. And it was....interesting. I did feel extra stretchy afterward, but then I went and ruined that by walking on the treadmill for half an hour because I didn't feel like I had really exercised. I'm not sure if I liked it enough to devote an hour or two a week to it, but I wouldn't mind doing it occasionally. I'm sure that attitude is the pet peeve of exercise instructors everywhere.

Before you even go to yoga class, I think it's safe to assume that a very large majority of yoga instructors are a bit on the granola (maybe hippie?) side. The lady tonight wasn't too bad, just a little crunchy (not that there's anything wrong with that). Her voice is kind of strident, but she's actually very liberal with the praise. She even played some good upbeat classical music (Mozart or something), which gives her an "A" in my book. Let's see...yoga is an art that takes time to get good at....we did some moves tonight that "stretched our organs"....we looked "beautiful" doing our postures....and I was corrected because my two mats were not exactly perpendicular to each other (the ultimate in humiliation for an anal retentive engineer).

I think I would take a massage over yoga class any day of the week. One of the things I struggled with was getting kind of bored. I think I was supposed to be concentrating on my breathing and energy lines and where my body parts were, but I had difficulty focusing my entire brain on that and then my whole brain would start to wander. I think part of the point of yoga is to be very intensely focused, so maybe I'm totally missing the point. However, do not let this lukewarm praise scare you off. Try it for yourself!

Viral

This post is proof yet again that you should not "force" a post because then you'll end up posting twice in one day with one of your posts being uninspired (take your pick on which one it is today).

I was reading about all those cases of swine flu down in Mexico, so to take some precautions I canceled my MySpace account. I don't want any viruses sneaking in on them thar wires. Plus, the last comment I received from somebody was from Shawna on September 20 of 2007. Obviously I wasn't using that service, so I canceled it. I have not succumbed to the lure of Facebook yet, so I'm free from virtual social networking at the moment! Well, unless you count blogs which I am not. Let me know if you want Facebook to die a quick death, and I'll sign up to help its demise along. That's what seemed to happen to MySpace.

Takin' What They're Givin' 'Cause I'm Workin' For a Livin'

Another week, another end of a month (paycheck!), and all that stuff. There's not too much going on here. It was nice here for like a day or two, and now it's raining and a bit chilly again. *sigh* So in lieu of fascinating life stories or clever contemplation, here's another "e-mail". I think I need to be careful not to get stuck in this rut too much - I don't want this to become a crutch or anything.

Thankfully this is not my company, but my aunt sent this to me and I thought it was funny enough to bear repeating.

Company Rules

DRESS CODE:
It is advised that you come to work dressed according to your salary. If we see you wearing $350 Prada sneakers & carrying a $600 Gucci bag we assume you are doing well financially and therefore you do not need a raise. If you dress poorly, you need to learn to manage your money better, so that you may buy nicer clothes and therefore you do not need a raise. If you dress in-between, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise.

SICK DAYS:
We will no longer accept a doctor statement as proof of sickness. If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.

SURGERY:
Operations are now banned. As long as you are an employee here, you need all your organs. You should not consider removing anything. We hired you intact. To have something removed constitutes a breach of employment contract.

PERSONAL DAYS:
Each employee will receive 104 personal days a year. They are called Saturdays & Sundays.

VACATION DAYS:
All employees will take their vacation at the same time every year. The vacation days are as follows:
Jan. 1, July 4 & Dec. 25

BEREAVEMENT LEAVE:
This is no excuse for missing work. There is nothing you can do for dead friends, relatives or coworkers. Every effort should be made to have non-employees attend to the arrangements. In rare cases where employee involvement is necessary, the funeral should be scheduled in the late afternoon. We will be glad to allow you to work through your lunch hour and subsequently leave one hour early, provided your share of the work is done.

ABSENCE DUE TO YOUR OWN DEATH:
This will be accepted as an excuse. However, we require at least two weeks notice as it is your duty to train your own replacement.

RESTROOM USE:
Entirely too much time is being spent in the restroom. In the future, we will follow the practice of going there in alphabetical order.
For instance, all employees whose names begin with 'A' will go From 8:00 to 8:20, employees whose names begin with 'B' will go from 8:20 to 8:40 and so on. If you're unable to go at your allotted time, it will be necessary to wait until the next day when your turn comes again. In extreme emergencies, employees may swap their time with a coworker. Both employees' supervisors must approve this exchange in writing. In addition, there is now a strict 3-minute time limit in the stalls. At the end of three minutes, an alarm will sound, the toilet paper roll will retract, the stall door will open and a picture will be taken. After your second offense, your picture will be posted on the company bulletin board under the "Chronic Offenders" category.

LUNCH BREAK:
Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch as they need to eat more so that they can look healthy. Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch to get a balanced meal to maintain their average figure. Fat people get 5 minutes for lunch, because that's all the time needed to drink a Slim Fast and take a diet pill.


Thank you for your loyalty to our company. We are here to provide a positive employment experience. Therefore, all questions, comments, concerns, complaints, frustrations, irritations, aggravations, insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplations, consternation and input should be directed elsewhere.

Have a nice week.
Manager.

Take Your Kid to Work

For a couple minutes today, I "took a kid to work" with me. One of the guys I sit near has a daughter in high school who is thinking about going to college to be an engineer, and she wanted to job shadow a female mechanical engineer as part of TYKTW day. So, I used my extensive "network" and found a friend who could give this girl a brief tour of her job for an hour or two today. So, I had a kid with me for the few brief minutes it took me to take the girl over to meet my mechanical engineering friend.

What is the point of this story? The point is that I realized once again as I was walking along with this girl how terrible I am at making small talk. In a vague sort of way I would like to be better at small talk, but I just can't get enthusiastic about making the effort to acquire the skill, which results in me never learning it. I usually don't care how good I am at that stuff, which is really the root of the problem. Good thing my ME friend isn't as much of a nerd as me so that the teenager didn't get a totally bad impression of female engineers.

The moral of this post is that people who don't talk much may not talk for many reasons:

• Shyness
• Vacancy of the brain (they never have any thoughts)
• Stuck up / Uppity
  
• Not interested in the topic of conversation
• Don't know what you are interested in talking about
• Just don't care
• Live in a fantasy land that you do not inhabit with them
• Deafness
• Had two strokes that paralyzed both sides of their body
• Don't speak your language well

OK, that's enough silliness. I'm sure I've said and revealed too much about myself now, so I better go. Later gators.

Politically Incorrect

Yesterday I was a little bit apprehensive because I was afraid I might be responsible for an abortion, but luckily I only had to do an eviction. I'm talking about a robin who built a nest on my house of course.

Since April is the month when "Earth Day" is, here's a little picture showing the hundreds who showed up to protest global warming.



And finally, with Jackie Chan's comments about China and freedom causing an uproar, here's some politically incorrect Asian humor:

Su Wong marries Lee Wong. The next year, the Wong's have a new baby. The nurse brings out a lovely, healthy, bouncy, but definitely a Caucasian, WHITE baby boy.

'Congratulations,' says the nurse to the new parents. 'Well Mr. Wong, what will you and Mrs. Wong name the baby?'

The puzzled father looks at his new baby boy and says, 'Well, two Wong's don't make a white, so I think we will name him...

Are you ready for this?

Sum Ting Wong

Because She Asked For It....

...Jen gets it! Below are a few choice wedding photos for her.



As I may have mentioned in my previous post, there was a whole lot of water going on in North Dakota. Below is a pair of pictures to illustrate. One was taken a week ago, and the other was taken last summer in approximately the same place. Guess which is which?

Weekend Whimsies

This past weekend I drove home to North Dakota for the long weekend with a few stops along the way. The trip was good overall with the exception of the little chat I had with one of State-With-The Arduously-Slow-Speed-Limit's finest. I got to see a whole truckload of relatives at my cousin's wedding too. I'm sort of ambivalent about going to weddings. It's not that I dislike going to them, but after the event it always seems like "I spent so much time/money to come here for just a couple hours?" The ceremonies are always nice and all that, but I feel like all I do is say a brief "hi" to everybody there, and the bride and groom will probably only vaguely remember who attended their wedding anyway. Yet I still feel compelled to go to weddings, so I guess somewhere in my subconscious I believe that my presence there will mean something to the bride and groom (likely more presents).

I'm not sure I'll have enough for a list if I give too many more details on my trip, so here goes. Good things about my trek to ND and back:

1. Staying the night with my cousin who always make me laugh (I forget how funny she is every time).
2. Seeing all my living aunts and uncles (and there are a bunch of them) in one fell swoop (some of them more than once).
3. Seeing all of my immediate family in one fell swoop (some of them more than once also).
4. Having my soul fed at Jimmytown Special Meeting.
5. Experiencing again that ND sense of humor.
6. Being morbidly fascinated with all the water there is in ND right now.
7. Seeing how happy my 48-year-old confirmed bachelor cousin was when he got married (you missed your window of opportunity Mo).
8. Listening to an interesting book on CD during the drive. I was quite a good listen - I would recommend it. The name of the book is "Freakonomics".
9. Getting a phone message from my sister with BIL-Dan in the background sounding like a cat saying "Hi Mel". That made me laugh for several minutes.
10. Seeing lots of people at SM that I hadn't seen for a long time.
11. Bonus: ND interstate speed limit: 75 mph!
    

That's it folks. Maybe I'll post a water picture when I get around to downloading my pictures. And yes, I apparently still look like my sister. Even my two year old niece calls me by my sister's name.

Scattered Thoughts

My apologies folks, but I just haven't had much to blog about recently. Everything has been very tame around here, and I've been working on a different computer project quite a bit. But, I was noticing that this year is once again a year of weddings. I thought last year was bad with three people I knew well getting married, but it's only the beginning of April and I already know of four people who will/have tied the knot this year. I'm just noticing that's a lot of people, that's all I'm saying....

In other news, I did some stuff to my computer at work today to try to make it run faster (it's taking 10 minutes to boot up), and it looks like one of the defrag/disk cleanup/registry repairs I did might have corrupted my Microsoft Office Suite files, so now I'll probably have to call the dreaded helpless desk tomorrow morning. There might be a bright side though. Maybe I'll get Office 2007 instead of 2003 now. One can always hope.

And here's a nice little quote I got via e-mail today that made me laugh, and maybe you'll do the same. "I was thinking about how a status symbol of today is those cell phones that everyone has clipped onto their belt or purse. I can't afford one. So, I'm wearing my garage door opener. I also made a cover for my hearing aid and now I have what they call blue teeth, I think."

Mortified Moms

This is for all you parents out there who have had your kids tell someone the truth, but it was only part of the story and puts you in a light that may be less than favorable. I have no idea if this episode is actually true (got this in an e-mail forward), but it sure cracked me up anyway. Read below for the "rest of the story".


(Here's the reply the teacher received the following day)

Dear Mrs. Jones,
I wish to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an exotic dancer. I work at Home Depot and I told my daughter how hectic it was last week before the blizzard hit. I told her we sold out every single shovel we had, and then I found one more in the back room, and that several people were fighting over who would get it. Her picture doesn't show me dancing around a pole. It's supposed to depict me selling the last snow shovel we had at Home Depot.

From now on I will remember to check her homework more thoroughly before she turns it in.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Smith