Bryce Moore's Blog, page 192

Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering?

Fairly on the busy side today. Yesterday was a complete whirlwind, starting early and finishing late. My goal today is to get things to a point that the wind can be less whirly. Part of that means I need to take a break from anything approaching a thoughtful blog post. So instead, I leave you all with this gem:

Every. Single. Thing. that Pinky ever pondered about.

I think that’s worth at least a thoughtful blog post or two, don’t you?

Working for the Money

On our drive down to the beach, Denisa was going through a game we’d bought a while ago for road trips. It had a series of questions that were supposed to start discussions. One that stood out in my mind? “Would you rather get paid a million dollars a year to do something you hate or $20,000 a year to do something you love?”

That was a pretty easy one for me to answer. A million dollars. In one year, you’d make more than you would in fifty years of the other option. Work a year or two or three, then retire and only do what you love from then on. A harder question would be something like this: “Would you rather get paid $40,000 a year to do something you hate or $20,000 to do something you love?” The exact price point might vary, but somewhere in there, you start to have a dilemma: make enough to be comfortable, but be unhappy making it, or make too little to be comfortable, and be happy. (Sometimes, of course, you don’t even have the option. You make what you can make, happy or not.)

I faced a similar decision (albeit on a smaller scale) when I was in college. I was working at the BYU Library, making $8.50 an hour and very content with that. It seemed like plenty. But I remember one night Denisa suggested (this was while we were still dating) that I look into jobs that pay better so that we’d have more to live on when we got married. After a bit of scrounging and searching, I came across what looked like a great job: gas meter reader at Questar. I’d make something like $11/hour! The best thing was that you got paid by the book. A book was a premade set of meters to read on a certain route. Questar calculated how long it “should” take to read them, and once you read them, you were paid that many hours, regardless of how long it actually took. There was one four hour book I could read in an hour.

I quit my job at the library once I got that job, and I worked reading gas meters for the next . . . two years? Something like that.

I made quite a bit more money, but I was a whole lot more miserable. Reading meters on sunny breezy day was just fine. Sure, you might get tired after a while, but it was good exercise, and good pay. But what about in a thunderstorm? Ever try scribbling down notes in a deluge? Or how about after it snowed a foot? And don’t forget angry dogs you had to deal with, or suspicious homeowners. There was a long list of things I didn’t love about that job. Things I actively disliked. Things I hated. (And when they changed it so that you no longer got paid by the book, but paid by the hour? It got even worse.)

In the end, I quit to go back to working in the library for quite a bit less money. But I loved working in the library. It was something I truly enjoyed doing. The money was only a part of the equation.

And that’s really what it is in the end, an equation. It’s not a simple matter of “Make $X and be Y happy.” That’s a lesson I learned reading those gas meters at Questar, and it’s probably one of the most valuable things I walked away from there with. Salary can overcome some problems with a job, and enjoying a job can overcome some problems with salary, but in the end, you have to look at your life and find where that minimum balance lies, and then stick to it. Ideally, you end up being well above it, but we all know life isn’t always ideal.

And that’s my deep thought for you today.

Looking for Tips for Going to the Beach

We went to the beach again yesterday. One last hurrah of summer, since the weather was in the 90s, and we had such a fun time last time. Things went even better this time, though I worried more in advance. It was Labor Day. What if the place was mobbed? What if traffic was awful? What if we had a bad time? (None of that happened, which is a prime piece of evidence for why making decisions based on “what if” often ends up in you making the wrong decisions.)

What made the difference this time? Why was the trip even better than the last? Most of it comes down to knowing what we were doing this time, as opposed to being clueless. We knew what stuff we didn’t use last time, so we left that home. (Changes of clothes, mainly.) We knew what we’d wished we’d had last time, so we brought that with us. (A stocked cooler. Better food. More toys.) We also knew what not to do: taking time out to make shopping stops with little kids before we got to the beach just made them tired ahead of time. We can do shopping later. Beach now.

And there are still some things we need to get down. Our beach umbrella had a hard time with the wind. Denisa and I walked up and down the beach to see who had gear that was handling the wind with ease, and it looked like the most successful setups were the portable cabanas. I think we should get one of those. Not sure what kind yet, though. Need to research it out.

There’s sure to be plenty of other ways to perfect a trip to the beach. I’m also looking into renting a house, so that it doesn’t have to be so hit and run when we go. Which leads me to my question to you fine readers. I know a lot of you out there have much more experience with the beach than I do. What do you consider the “must have” things you take with you when you go to the beach? What are the top bits of advice you’d give someone, if they were headed on such an outing?

It’s too late for this year, but I’m looking forward to years to come, and thought I’d ask now. It never hurts to be prepared.

Thanks in advance!

What to Do When Goals Go Wrong

The fact that I’m big on goal setting has been well-established. I set daily goals, monthly goals, yearly goals–you name it. And for them to really work (in my experience), the key comes down to those daily goals. Breaking up big projects into bite-sized pieces that you can focus on in isolation to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed.

I’ve talked to other people about their goals, and a lot of the time it seems like they don’t like using those daily goals because they get behind on them, and then once they’re behind, they feel like they need to catch up. That’s where things fall apart.

If I have a goal to write 1,000 words each day, and I miss it one day and then roll over the balance of what I missed it by, I’m essentially going into . . . “goal debt.” (It’s like credit card debt, without the risk of a collections agency coming after you. Unless your goal was work-related.)

Just like any kind of debt, goal debt can really mess up your plans. Ideally, you set a goal that was challenging but obtainable. For me, that’s 1,000 words a day for writing. I can do that. At this point, with all the experience I have meeting that goal, I know it’s reachable. But from experience, I know that 2,000 words a day is a real stretch. I tried that last year for NaNoWriMo, and while I managed to pull it off, it took a lot of work. 3,000 words a day? I don’t think I could keep it up. I’d drown.

But that’s exactly where you put yourself the deeper you go into goal debt. Say you’re only really able to get 500 words a day in consistently, but you’ve set your goal at 1,000. So the first day, you try really hard and get 1,000. The second day, you only hit 750, so the third day, you force yourself to plow through and make 1,250. Huzzah! But then you’re exhausted, and the fourth day, you don’t write at all. The fifth day, you’re supposed to write 2,000 words, but you only get in 500. The sixth day, you’re supposed to hit 2,500, but even with working as hard as you can, you barely crack 1,000. The seventh day?

You give up.

In this case, I’d say your goal should be interest free. If you’ve set it to stretch yourself, then fine. Shoot for the stars. But don’t punish yourself if you don’t make it. Reset the goal at the beginning of the next day back to 1,000. Personally, I prefer goals I can make. I’m not trying to stretch myself when it comes to writing. I’m trying to run a long marathon. I need slow but steady wins the race, not Speedy Gonzales.

But make your goals work for you. Figure out how that is, and go for it.

Then again, sometimes you might need to set those daily goals because you have a dreaded deadline. It’s externally imposed on you. You’ve got to get that paper written on time, no matter what. Escaping goal debt is pretty much impossible, if you get behind. Believe me, I know. When I was writing my masters thesis, it seemed like I’d never finish.

What do you do then?

In my experience, you avoid the debt by working harder at the beginning. Carve out some wiggle room for yourself, so that you’re ahead of the curve. If your goal is to write 5 pages of a thesis a day, write 7 a day for the first few days. It’s tough, but doable. Then, you’ve got a bit of padding between that deadline and your goal. If you have a bad day, you can afford to miss a little here or there. It’s just like money: saving up some time (or goal currency) for a future emergency can help you stay calm and collected throughout the project.

Anyway. Those two principles have been what helped me the most to get through grad school and write novel-length fiction. I use them all the time. Any tips you have for tackling big projects?

Some Paris Travel Advice

Okay. I realize a lot of you readers out there might not be planning a trip to Paris anytime soon. But maybe you are. Or maybe you will be at some point, and you’ll remember this post. (Or maybe *I’ll* be planning a trip there again sometime, and I’d like to read this post.) In that case, I thought I’d give you a few pointers on what I learned traveling through Paris with a family this time around. Ready? Here we go.

Getting from the airport with public transportation isn’t difficult, but it will seem that way the first time you do it. You need to walk over to the train station (literally part of the airport), and buy tickets, either from automatic machines or from the ticket counter. (At the ticket counter, you can buy Metro tickets and train tickets. I’d go to the ticket counter and get all your tickets for your trip in one fell swoop.) Once you have the tickets, you have to get to the train. This is where it stops being fun. Paris has these automatic gates (similar to most big public transportation), where you put your ticket into a small slot, it scans it, and it spits it out a different slot. You then take it back, then gates open, and you go through. (You do the same thing to get out when you’ve arrived.) When you have no luggage, that’s fine and easy. When you have kids and luggage? Much more difficult. If you get lucky, there’ll be an attendant there who can open a gate for you to all walk through and avoid the whole thing. If you get unlucky, you’ve got to figure it out on your own. (Guess which one I got first?)
My plan to stay downtown worked like a charm. We were in a small apartment 100 yards from Notre Dame, right in the thick of things. The place had to be a few hundred years old at least. (Speaking as someone whose house is almost 175 years old, I should know.) There was no elevator, and the lights were sketchy at times (the light switches looked the same as the door bells. I didn’t really want to ring someone at 10 at night.) But we were close to mass transit to take us anywhere, and it was just a bit more expensive than a hotel room. Plus, it had a fridge and kitchen, and an extra bedroom. Go VRBO!
Buying food in the middle of Paris is a bit befuddling, mainly because the grocery store looks like a CVS. Seriously. Monoprix. You go in, and all you see are shampoo bottles and ibuprofen, plus a little nook that sells pre-made sandwiches. But you keep going in, and you find a magical escalator that leads downstairs to what I’m convinced is a primitive TARDIS. There’s a whole grocery store down there! Craziness. It saved us a bundle.
We bought metro day passes individually. It worked out cheaper than buying their fancy pants tourist travel pass.
We bought the Paris Museum Pass, and that was totally worth it. $42 euros for two days each, but kids are free. We got to see a whole bunch of museums, and got to cut in line everywhere we went. It probably saved us about 30 euros total, plus a bunch of headache and time. Very pleased with the buy. (For the record? We adored the Musee d’Orsay. So much awesome there, from Van Gogh to Monet. The Louvre? I could have skipped it and still felt fine. Much bigger crowds, and I’m just a bigger fan of Impressionist paintings. Plus, seeing the Mona Lisa from 10 feet away with a crowd of people pressed all over you? Not my idea of a fun time. That museum is massive. Not good for kids, for the most part. But maybe I was just in a rush by then, and tired out of museums.
Versailles is also very much like other palaces I’ve been to. It was like Vienna all over again. The gardens, on the other hand, were gorgeous. (They also weren’t included in the price of the Museum Pass, we found out.) Still worth the entrance. TRC was less than enthused about seeing gardens, until I came up with a game. Someone would challenge someone else in the family to mimic a statue in the gardens. Once that challenge was fulfilled, the person who’d been challenged got to challenge someone else. With the addition of that game, everyone had a great time.
If you’re going to go up the Eiffel Tower, reserve your spot online well in advance. Don’t wait until the last minute.
This is a general tourist tip: don’t stay in the same places where all the other tourists are. Take the road less traveled. If you’re looking for a bite to eat, head off to an out of the way spot. Not only will this show you cool things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, but it’ll save you a bundle. For example, when we got out of Versailles, it was hot, and the kids all wanted ice cream. But ice cream at Versailles and the places between Versailles and the train station was all inordinately expensive. 4 euros a pop at least, for small sizes. So I headed with the family the opposite direction–away from Versailles and the train station. Within five minutes, we got to a small store that had the same ice cream for 1 euro each. And we saw a bit of downtown Versailles. That’s a win in my book.

In Which I Pay $1,600 for Shakeology

You all know I’m on sort of a health kick (for me), right? I exercise. I don’t eat (too much) sugar. Then would it surprise you to hear that I’d recently spent $1,600 on Shakeology products? That, in fact, I’d signed up for $800 worth of Shakeology to be delivered every month?

Because it certainly surprised me.

I was sitting in my kitchen last night, going through the backlog of mail that had accumulated while we were away on vacation. Our LL Bean credit card statement was in there, so I dutifully opened it up and scanned it to make sure that–

For the love of all that’s good, why do I have a balance over $1,600?

Denisa and I love some LL Bean and all, and we had bought some backpacks there last month, but I was pretty sure the backpacks weren’t quite that expensive. The Bean can be pricey and all, but not that pricey.

“Denisa,” I asked. “Why did we spend over a grand on our Bean card?”

She was just as surprised as I was. I turned the page to see what the charges were for, and there were the lovely Shakeology purchases. $800+, recurring every month on the fourth.

Not cool.

So I called LL Bean and was speaking to a representative within a minute. They were very understanding, issued new cards to us, took off the charges, and had me fixed up and ready to go in about ten minutes. They suggested I call Shakeology and alert them as well, so I called them next.

After being on hold for a half hour, I spoke with a representative who insisted on knowing my name, zip code, and account number with them. Even after I explained I didn’t actually have an account with them, and that I wasn’t in their system. That rep had a script, by golly, and she was going to follow it no matter what. She talked over me, ignored what I had to say, and took ten minutes to figure out why I was calling.

And once she did?

“Since you don’t have an account with us, I can’t make any changes to someone else’s account.”

I blinked. “It’s my credit card. It’s under my name, with my address. I can’t stop it being used to buy stuff from you?”

Yup. That’s pretty much exactly what the story was. She did offer to send me to a different rep who might be able to look up the account by credit card, but by that point, I was done with Shakeology. I was just doing this as a favor to them, and they didn’t really seem to care. Whatever.

Long story short, my brief affair with Shakeology didn’t amount to much. I don’t have to actually pay any of that $1,600, and I was way impressed with Bean’s customer service. Real people, real help. Shakeology?

Not so much.

How Keeping Track of My Reading Has Helped Me

Some of you might recall I set a goal back at the beginning of the year to keep track of my reading habits. (I know. Me and goals? What a surprise. /sarcasm) The purpose at the time was to help kick myself in the pants and start reading more than I had been. A librarian and an author, and I was barely getting a book a month in. Pitiful, right? So I started that spreadsheet, and I’ve dutifully been tracking my reading all year.

After the first 8 months, I’ve already read 28 books. Over 12,000 pages of reading.

Now, I know that for some of you, that’s chump change. But for me? I’m pretty proud of that. (Obviously. I mean, I’m writing a whole blog post about it, after all.) I’m already doing a fair bit in my life, so finding time to read is something I have to set as a priority, even though it sounds silly. Why prioritize something I like to do in my spare time and would voluntarily do tons of if left to my own devices?

It’s simple: because I have so many other things I’m doing, I need to make time for things that are also important and that I enjoy, or else they won’t happen.

When seen from this angle, it all seems so simple. I’m used to scheduling time to do the things I’m not really wanting to do. (Answer all those emails that built up while I was away on vacation, for one thing.) Why have all that practice on blocking off time if you never use it for something you enjoy?

Why does keeping track of the books I read help me read more? I have no idea. I can’t imagine it’s unique to me, but I’ve found that when I track things, I pay more attention to them. There have been a few spots through the year where the reading has ebbed, and I’ve noticed it’s ebbed because I’m keeping track of it. That’s enough of a reminder for me that I step up my game some and get back on track. When I wasn’t following it closely, the reading would ebb, and I’d blink and find a few months had passed without me reading a book. (Also, it helps that I’ve tracked how much I’ve been watching. Balance in all things.)

Anyway. That’s my update for the day. Now it’s back into the fray with work backlog. Wish me luck!

Back to School

It’s here! It’s here! The end of August is finally upon us. The only way it could get any better is if the weather gods would play along with this scenario. But one way or the other, cooler days lie ahead, and I’m done with bugs and sweat for another seven or eight months. (Yay Maine winters!)

I’m also done with vacation, of course. But the nice thing about a whirlwind European vacation is that by the time it’s over, you’re looking forward to sleeping in your own bed and getting back to your nice, comfy routine.

Did I say “nice, comfy”? Sorry. I forgot. Denisa’s teaching this semester, TRC is in middle school for the first time, DC is on to second grade, and I have an edit of THE MEMORY THIEF to get done in about six weeks or so. (Got the notes right before I left on vacation. I’ve thought about what I’m going to do, but I haven’t touched the book yet. I wanted momentum. Hey–it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

So there might not be anything to nice and comfy about being back in the swing of things. Still, you don’t think of those details when you’re exhausted from traipsing around every tourist attraction in Paris in less than 48 hours. (Go hard, or go home. Or (as I like to do it), go hard and then go home.)

But that’s all okay. Because football season is here. Autumn is on its way. And I don’t have a plane ticket bought, which means I’m not getting on one of those hellacious demon inventions for at least another few months.

Seriously, the trip went smashingly. I hope you were following along with all the pics and videos I was posting on Facebook. We had a great time.

And end of August or not, it’s still difficult to be in Paris one day and at my desk the next.

Time for emails!

Don’t Be Such an Idiot

As I suspected, I haven’t had near the amount of time to post on the blog while I’m over here in Europe. No complaints from me, but I did have a minute right now, and I came across a perfect topic for a nice quick post. The theme?

Don’t be an idiot.

Not like people want to be idiots in general, I realize. But Denisa and I took Tomas to go see an old socialist elevator today. I took a video of it, and it’s up on my Facebook page. (Sorry–no time or easy way to post it here. But my Facebook page is public.) Why would we go all touristy for an elevator?

Because it’s not really an elevator. It’s a paternoster. And you don’t get the chance to see one of those very often, let alone actually ride one. I’d checked it out a few years ago, and I still remembered it being really cool. I wasn’t let down.

For those of you too lazy to click the links (shame on you!), a paternoster is a continually moving elevator that you step on and step off. Think of it as a sort of a hybrid between an elevator and an escalator. And then add a flair for danger. There’s no possible way I could imagine one of these being built in America, let alone used. They’re illegal in most of Europe, after all. Here in Trencin? There’s a sign in the lobby that says kids under 10 aren’t allowed on it, and the elderly and disabled shouldn’t use it.

Not like there’s any sort of enforcement, of course.

I marveled to Denisa that they’d allow something like this to just be out there to be used by the public. Wouldn’t it kill people? It seems the sort of thing that would have a thousand law suits getting in line the moment someone cut the ribbon for the grand opening.

Denisa shrugged. “People know they shouldn’t be stupid on it. If they are, then it’s their fault.”

It’s a refreshing concept. What if all the legal disclaimers in America were replaced by a simple “Don’t be an idiot” statement? I suppose there’d need to be a footnote in there somewhere, detailing all the different things “idiot” encompasses . . .

But one can always dream.

In the meantime, we had a great time on the paternoster, and not one of us was maimed, injured, or killed. I call that a successful day.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Before I headed off to Europe, I wanted to be sure to catch Mission Impossible in the theater. It seemed like a “better in the theater” sort of experience, and I’d read good things about it, so why not?

The good things were confirmed.

The Mission Impossible series of films seem like they’re almost defying the typical sequel structure. It seemed like they were heading for sequelville for the first while. Mission Impossible II was pretty weak, John Woo or no John Woo. But somehow they bucked the trend, and after watching this movie, it reminded me of an early James Bond franchise. As if the series might manage to get to a level where it breaks free of petty things like numbering the films and just is this continuous platform for action espionage movies.

You’ve got all the basic elements: death-defying stunts, great action sequences, stable characters who never really change, awesome gadgets. The film felt like James Bond: Team Edition, and that’s a very good thing in my book.

Plus, Tom Cruise seems set to prove to the world that he just doesn’t care when it comes to his personal safety. The opening sequence where they literally have him hang onto a plane while it takes off? Insanity.

The movie might have been a tad too long. I think they could have tightened things up a bit more and shaved off 5-10 minutes and ended up with an even better end result, but that’s about all I had to complain about. The plot made sense, it wasn’t predictable, and it was just a fantastic escape movie. (Though I have a hard time watching any movie with Alec Baldwin in it these days and not pretending he’s playing his character from 30 Rock, which sometimes tends to break the tension.)

This is a good one, people. Check it out. 9 out of 10 from me. Seen it already? What did you think?