Another Emily-ism
This picture is of one of the lovely Willow Tree figurines that Ashley has been collecting since we have been married. I believe we were given one for a wedding present and, as our family has grown, I have bought more that represent our family as gifts for Ashley. To most of us, this is a representation of a mother and a daughter — I got this for Ashley as Emily really started walking around as a toddler.
Yesterday morning, as I was brushing my teeth, Emily came into our room and seemingly noticed this figurine for the first time. What did she think it was? "Here is Daddy and here is Mommy!" Do you think that she may be saying that Ashley is a bit on the short side?
Snakes
This morning, Emily was in our room with me while I was putting on my socks and shoes. This is not all that unusual, but for some reason this morning, she was obsessing over one of the pillows that goes on Ashley's and my bed. I stopped pulling on my shoes and watched her for a few minutes; then, I realized that she was hissing as she was twirling the tassels on the pillow.
I asked Emily what she was doing and I got this response: "I see snakes." I asked her where and she pointed at the pillow and then swung her arm around to point at a random place on the floor. "Oh no! Snakes!" she exclaimed. I decided to play along, so we spent the rest of the morning, until time to go, chasing around the house, hunting for snakes and catching them.
This evening, after we got home, I was sure that she had forgotten all about the snakes. However, after dinner, she suddenly turned to me and, in that cute little two year old voice, whispered "Daddy! Snakes!! I get two snakes, kay?"
The great snake hunt of 2009 was on again.
How to Read a Book
How well do you read books? In "How to Read a Book", Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren state their belief that most people do not read books beyond a grammar school proficiency level. However, the goal of their book is to increase your skill in reading and, by doing so, enable you to read great books for understanding instead of merely for information. What is the difference between understanding and information? According to Adler and van Doren:
To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
Adler and van Doren posit that there are four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Elementary reading is the reading skill that children are taught in grammar school and that gives us the basics of reading for information and pleasure. To be sure, having a high percentage of the population literate in this sense is a great accomplishment. This allows a large portion of the population to gather information from reading books. However, the first level of reading can only take you so far.
Inspectional reading is meant to give you an overview of a book, of both its structure and its contents. Inspectional reading can be thought of as pre-reading a book, in preperation to reading a book analytically. Additionally, inspectional reading plays an important role in helping you determine which books are worth reading analytically; this is helpful in preparing to undertake a syntopic understanding of a subject.
Analytical reading is meant to increase you understanding through a thorough reading of the book. Adler and van Doren state that there are four questions you must ask and, through analytical reading, answer about a book:
- What is the book about as a whole?
- What is being said in detail, and how?
- Is the book true, in whole or in part?
- What of it?
If you can answer these questions about a book, you have done your job as an intelligent reader and increased your understanding by learning what the book had to teach you. Adler and van Doren provide a thorough set of rules that will enable you to learn to read analytically.
Syntopical reading goes a step further than analytical reading; syntopical reading acknowledges that any one book is not likely to contain the complete story and that a survey of several books may be needed to fully understand the subject matter. To that end, Adler and van Doren lay out a process through which you may combine the skills of inspectional and analytical reading to find and understand the relevant books to your chosen subject.
So, what of it? Does "How to Read a Book" accomplish its purpose? I believe that it does. Since reading it, I have begun to actively read the books that I am consuming so that I may come to an understanding with the authors instead of being a passive participant in the conversation.
Post-Vacation Blues
Boy, vacations sure are a lot of fun. In the middle of May, we spent a week in Virginia at Erin's house. Everyone had a blast and I am pretty sure that Emily and Jake enjoyed having a playmate for the week. We even managed to get back early enough to have a couple of days off due to the Memorial Day holiday. However, things have just been off with me ever since we got back. I have been tired, short-tempered, and generally stressed. I attribute all three symptoms to two root causes.
First, I have gotten out of the habit of getting up early and exercising in the morning. I believe that not exercising during our vacation has started a positive feedback loop. Not exercising means I am not as physically worn out at night, so I do not sleep well. Not sleeping well means that I feel too tired to get out of bed early enough to go exercise in the morning. Both of these symptoms feed back on each other causing both to get worse.
Second, it has been difficult for me to focus on projects that I have been wanting to get done. When I get home at night and finally get Emily to bed, I have been so tired that I just want to watch television for the 1.5 hours I have before I go to bed. Generally, this makes me feel guilty since I can think of so many other things that I want and should do. The guilt is likely contributing to my lack of sleep as well. Additionally, my task list and inbox keep growing since I am not really clearing them out. All of these contribute to a downward spiral where I get very little done.
So, what can I do to turn things around?
- I need to start exercising again as soon as possible. This weekend will be the perfect time because I do not have to worry about getting up extra early to exercise. Getting back in the exercise routine in the morning will increase my endorphin output and cause my day to start on a bright point. This alone might be enough to turn my mood around and kick me out of the funk.
- I need to do a really good weekly review. I put it off completely right after vacation because I was unable to get any "me" time to work on it due to sleeping in so late. This past week, I managed to get one done, but it was hurried and really was not very good. Doing a weekly review will get things out of my head. Getting "stuff" out of my head will let me concentrate more on what I am doing and less on what I could be doing.
- Strangely, I have found that getting out and working in the yard is putting me in a better mood. On Friday, I came home in a bit of a funk and just really wanted to be by myself. Luckily, I needed to get out and mow the yard. Doing that before dinner relaxed me and made it so that I could be back inside with the family without being irritable. Working out in the yard allows me to have the little bit of "me" time that I need to recharge my batteries after a long week.
I am going to work on applying these three principles over the next couple of weeks and see if that will break me out of these post-vacation blues.
Weight Tracking – Part 2
So, in writing the previous post on my Weight Tracking spreadsheet, I came upon a bit of a conundrum. I wanted to export my graph as an image, but I could not figure out how to do that in Numbers. I am sure that there is a way to do so, but it was not immediately obvious, even with a brief Google search. So, being a good engineer, I decided to roll my own weight tracking script.
Writing my own script has several advantages. First, writing my own script gave me a simple project to begin learning Ruby, something I have been wanting to do. Second, it allows me to extend the script with functionality that might be clumsy in a spreadsheet. Right now, I am just keeping track of the same information that I did in the spreadsheet, dates and weights, only I track it in a simple text file. The script calculates the sliding average for me. If needed, I can easily munge the data in other ways or pull together a secondary text file with other information like my workout routine. I know that I could do the same thing in a spreadsheet, but I like the flexibility that a full programming language gives me over the comparative restraint that I feel when I am hacking together formulas in a spreadsheet. Additionally, my data is kept in a simple text file instead of being tied to a Numbers spreadsheet.
Finally, and most importantly, I was easily able to pull in a library that allowed me to plot my weight and the sliding average of my weight over time and export it as an image file.
There are two obvious improvements that I will likely implement. First, I am calculating the sliding window average of my weight as an integer. That is what causes the strange steps on the graph. I will probably change to calculating the average as a real number, just to make the graph a little smoother. Second, I think that I want to have more points on the X-axis of the graph. Looking at it, I think that the first of each month should be marked on the graph, possibly with lines of demarcation running in the Y-direction at each monthly border. I will have to play around with it and see what all I can do with the graphing library. That is the great thing about being a programmer; if the software you are using does not do what you want it to do, you can either fix it or write your own version.