To sleep or not to sleep...

...that's the question I'm dealing with right now. Spurred on by some tips in this article, I've been attempting to alter my poor sleep habits for about a week now. The gist of the article is that if you wake up at the same time every morning and listen to your body at night, you'll be able to know when you need to go to sleep to get up at that early hour every day. I know, it sounds a little backwards, but there is some truth there.

I have a natural tendency to hit that snooze button over and over again until I'm running late every day. Back when I worked at this job, I ended up getting a warning or two about tardiness. Granted, they were overly strict about every spare minute, but it was still my responsibility to show up on time. I was always on the jagged edge of lateness due to that snooze button.

Once, after hanging out with a Surfer/Pastor/Poet friend of mine from Panama City Beach, I was inspired and attempted to write a little poem. It ended up being a silly little thing about how jarring and evil an alarm clock is. No, I don't remember the words, I only remember that it was a pretty poor excuse for poetry. But it was significant to me in that the only poem I've ever written was about how much I hate alarm clocks.

Getting back to the point, I've been at this endeavor for a week now. My goal was 6:30am, wake up, work out, have breakfast with my wife, and take a shower. I would have even settled for 7:00am if I was really tired.

It worked great on Day One. I was even at work on time.

Day Two - slept in a little, but was up before my normal time. I had forgotten to iron a shirt the night before, however, so I actually ended up being late for work again.

Day Three - back to my old habit.

Day Four was Saturday. I slept in until 9:00am. Not looking good so far.

Day Five was Sunday, and I always get up at 6:30am anyway, because I have to be at church so early. I got up at 6:38am. (That's equivalent to one extra snooze button time period, or as I like to call it, one "Snooze Unit".)

Day Six was today. Unfortunately, I had some pretty bad nightmares last night (which I never have), so I didn't sleep well. I was so tired, I don't even remember getting out of bed this morning. But I did get out of bed...even later than normal.

Day Seven is tomorrow, and I'm blogging this at midnight. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Oh my.

"Star Wars"...on a Banjo.

Sure, he's no Bela Fleck, but I like it.

Man Repellent and the W.A.F.

Here are two new phrases that I am submitting for inclusion in our standard vocabulary.

"Man Repellant" is what I use to refer to things (especially T.V. shows) that Michelle is interested in, but would drive any man away. For example, Michelle flipped on the telly while she ate a snack, and stopped on some girly show. I walked in, saw what it was, and immediately declared it "Man Repellent". Instead of lingering, I went into my cave and watched the opening chase scene in The Transporter. That's a pretty good antidote, in my opinion.

Feel free to use this phrase at your discretion.

The other phrase, which I did not coin, but ran across today, is "W.A.F.", or "Wife Acceptance Factor". Also known as "Wife Approval Factor", it is the rating you can give to the chance that your wife will accept the lasest geeky hobby/tech gadget/computer purchase, etc..

These endeavors can either have a high or low Wife Acceptance Factor. For example, Jeremy came into my office today, and we were discussing various geeky projects, including his Centipede arcade machine running on MAME. He pondered aloud whether Darcy would let him move his arcade cabinet into Madeleine's room. I stated that this prospect had a very low W.A.F. However, he went on to describe how he would like to take the control interface and adapt it to control a mouse, so that Madeleine could play educational games on the box. This idea should now have a high W.A.F.

Some other examples:

Bringing home flowers. -- High W.A.F.

Tracking dirt/grease into the house after working in the garage all day. -- Low W.A.F.

Bringing home another outdated PC to turn into a new webcam server, etc.. -- Low W.A.F.

Bringing home another project vehicle. -- Rock-bottom W.A.F. (probably resulting in me sleeping in the garage for good.)

Ouch.

During our men's group Sunday night, we briefly ran across the subject of being a Christian in the workplace. It reminded me of an eye-opening event. But first, let's set the stage.

--/begin setting stage:

A few jobs ago, I worked at this large company (900+ employees in a large cube farm) where I got promoted to work on a QC team. Basically, I was decent enough at what I did and technically-savvy, so I got to be a member of this five-person Quality Control group. We grabbed "grunt work" submitted by all of the other 60 or so employees in my department, and checked them for accuracy, compliance with regulations, etc.

It was pretty mind-numbing after a while, but better than doing the grunt work I had graduated from.

(Imagine the above picture as half of my department. Now imagine that there are eight to ten more departments of that size. Now cram all of that into one large, open building with no windows. Cubes as far as the eye can see. Have I scared you yet?)

--/end setting stage.

Anyway, there were two other Christians in my group that stood out. I'll call the first one "Laverne", because she reminds me a LOT of Nurse Laverne on Scrubs. She always spouted Christianese phrases and had a bit of the "holier-than-thou" air about her. But, she was sweet and we got along well. Her main problem was her work ethic - it stunk. Always late, put out very poor-quality work, etc..

The second, I'll refer to as "Pam". As in Pam from The Office. I also had a Jim-like crush on her, but like Pam, she had a fiance. That she eventually married. So, no Season-Two-Finale-Kiss going on there.

Anyway, she was very pretty, and had a great personality. The only odd thing about her? She belonged to this denomination that was very strict about hair, makeup, dress, etc. Most everyone in the department really liked her, but thought she must be weird because of the almost-cultish "rules" she had to follow.

I kept these summations of my fellow Christians to myself, but always felt that I should try and balance out the equation by trying to be a stable, reliable, and above all NORMAL Christian. Yeah, that worked out well.

One afternoon, "Pam" pulled me aside and told me that someone had asked her why, if I was a Christian, did I loudly bad-mouth other people's work when doing QC? You see, those of us in the QC group tended to mouth off to each other to let off steam, and that usually included making fun of the obvious mistakes other people made that we had found during the day.

I had also forgotten the fact that, in a cube farm, EVERYTHING said out loud can not only be heard by 20 other people, but spreads quickly.

Needless to say, I was shaken up by "Pam's" statement. Here I was, trying to be that good Christian and be an example to the non-Christians around me, and I didn't even notice that I was just as jaded and flawed as everyone else. What a world view, right?

I can only hope that the experience has served to illicit some change in my behavior. It's definitely made me more aware of how criticizing others often only serves to damage our reputation as Christians. I still tend to be a bit snarky, but I try to do so in a way that doesn't put others down. At least, that's my goal.

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
Matthew 7:1-5

Dark Side of the Rainbow.

Heard about the Dark Side of the Rainbow? You can watch it here.

And out of the blue...Ninjas attack.

I have NO IDEA what comic book this is from, but it's great.

Click to zoom in:

Monkeys in Barrels.

From this article explaining the posible origins of the phrase "More fun than a barrel of monkeys":

Word historian Charles E. Funk wrote: "One monkey arouses a great deal of amusement. Two or more then double the...amusement. If one were to release a barrelful...of monkeys, we must suppose that their antics would become hilariously comical."

Indeed.

I think I might change my last name to "Funk" like that guy. Then after I get my doctorate, I could be "Dr. Funk". Even just plain old "Mr. Funk" would be fine.

My cute pregnant wife and I.

My Mom was visiting this past weekend and gave me some pictures she had taken. This is one of them...