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October 29, 2007
red sox!
YEAH SOX!!!!
Posted by Mark at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2007
sox!
I honestly feel a little bad for Colorado right now. I mean, I like to win; I like to see the Sox win, but at this point, I kinda want to say:
"Ok, guys. You're having a rough night. Let's just give us the win, you guys head back to your hotel, rest up, come back tomorrow. This has got to be really painful for you. I mean, look, you just walked in 3 runs. 3 RUNS. THREE. Every one of our starters but one has at least one RBI, and the one guy who doesn't has a couple of hits, and you gave him the intentional walk once anyway (of which I do not approve, by the way, no matter how much you suck...be a man; throw it over the plate).
"But this...this is doing nobody any good. In the interests of good sportsmanship, I don't feel it's necessary to continue. Get some Z's."
Now, I know the situation can turn around at any point, but so far, there is no sign of the poor Rockies pulling it back together. And they are just a mess right now.
On the other hand, it's kinda nice to be watching the Sox play and being able to relax for once, unlike the ALCS, where I pretty much couldn't watch more than about 3 innings in a row on account of my nerves buzzing like bees in blender.
Go Sox!
Posted by Mark at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
washer, kitchen, spring
More or less as expected, the repairs to the portable washer exceed the cost of replacing it with a new one. We've been doing the laundry downstairs for the last few months, as I've only now gotten around to having a repair guy come by. The transmission is bad, and when I asked him how much it would cost, he made a face like eating a lemon and showed me his laptop screen.
So we're probably going to wait until post-wedding and just remodel the kitchen. New fridge, new stove, new dishwasher, new cabinets, countertop and floor, and a proper plumbed-in washer/dryer stack. Maybe instead of plates we'll register for applicances.
It always feels like registration for the next semester happens before I'm even settled into the current semester. But, I'm signed up for an Operational Management course and a required but hard-to-get Stats class in the spring, and textbooks are on the way.
Matt is going to Belgium and the Netherlands, which is cool. That's a neat part of the world to see, and a lot of fun. Good beer, too.
Posted by Mark at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2007
bulletin board
I finished the bulletin board today and put it up in the hallway. It looks pretty neat:
The secret is this: read Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel and Pier One catalogs...for the ideas. Then steal them and make them yourself. You really don't need much more than a small circular saw, a drill, a sander, a hammer and some wood glue, and you can pretty much put anything together yourself. If you stick with a rustic look, your mistakes will look like just another part of the piece. Pine may be soft, but it's cheap, and it looks just fine unfinished. Or, if you want to stain or lacquer it, pine is light enough to provide a blank canvas for whatever color you're going for.
Not to be limited only to the wood shop, I also baked some whole wheat soft pretzels. The secret to making really good soft pretzels is to poach them in boiling water before baking them. I think I might have to try making my own bagels sometime too.
I've been running around all weekend and am having trouble slowing down. Kara is still sick, so I'm going to work from home tomorrow so I can continue to play nurse.
I am basically the male Martha Stewart.
Posted by Mark at 10:32 PM | Comments (2)
October 20, 2007
kitchen, corks, leadership
Kara is sick, so I told her to take a day off and sit on the couch. I, on the other hand, have been pretty busy.
The pot rack is up, as seen below, and we did some fairly significant rearranging of the kitchen. I was getting annoyed at never being able to find the spice I was looking for in the cabinet where we were keeping the spices, so I built a couple of new spice racks. I need to start cooking with a lot more cilantro because I've got doubles of that, along with some other spices, but it's nice having more space and being able to find what you're looking for.
I'm also building a combination blackboard/corkboard/mailbox/key rack for the entry hall. I've seen similar things in Pottery Barn and such, but they aren't 100% what I'm looking for. The great thing about having some basic tools and the ability to use them is that you never have to rely on what somebody else is selling for too much money. I'd expect to pay at least a hundred bucks for something like this, but it's going to cost me about $30 in materials.
The corkboard part is going to be made out of wine corks, similar to one of these. Unfortunately, I discovered tonight that I've only got about half the corks I need to finish it completely. I guess we'll just have to drink a lot of wine!
If any family or friends read this, please consider this an invitation to save your corks for me. I'd prefer corks made of real cork, not plastic or reconstituted cork (although the latter is preferred over the former), and champagne/beer corks won't really work. If I end up with more corks than I need, well, they make a nice centerpiece if you put them in a jar, or I could always make some nice trivets out of them as gifts. So save those corks!
Classes are going well. My leadership class is making me really stop and think and question what I'm doing and how I am professionally, and that's a good thing. I have a feeling it's going to end up being one of the classes I really come back to as my career goes along.
I did this thing called a "360-degree review," which is where you ask bosses, coworkers, friends and direct reports (if you have any; I don't) to answer some questions and thus rate you in five categories. I discovered from this that, while I thought I would rate very high in the Inspire and Challenge categories, I in fact rated lowest in those. However, I thought I would rate low in the Enable and Model categories, while those were my two highest. From this, it seems that I'm not as much a firebrand visionary as I thought I was, but am in fact a lot better at helping people get their jobs done and setting an example for how to do them.
As touchy-feely as a lot of this stuff is, I am starting to think that actual management requires knowledge of how to get people to do things. It has very little to do with being good at the things your subordinates are doing. In that sense, a great computer programmer can end up being a terrible manager (as I've seen too often in my career) because of lack of people skills. Yet a lousy carpenter can be a great architect.
I maintain that you have to have some idea of how to do what your subordinates do, simply to gain and keep their respect. But being good at a thing does not mean you ought to be leading others in doing it. And, in fact, if you are good at leading people, I think you ought to be comfortable with the fact that others are better at the actual tasks than you, and be able to gain their respect by being a good organizer and administrator...leaving them free to do their thing.
I was talking with my classmate, Lindsey, the other day, over a couple of beers. He did his undergrad in econ, so for him, the MBA is more symbolic than actually learning new technical skills. We talked about the housing market, and how it has been said that people need to stop seeing their homes as investments, and more as just places to live.
I think that's overstating it. I think a home is an investment. I do not, however, think it is a get-rich scheme. The same goes for the MBA. I don't think you get your MBA and suddenly everybody is giving you $120K job offers (although that might be true in some sectors). I think you get your MBA so your career can progress being "being really good at doing what you do." So that when you get to the leadership stage, you might have a little more knowledge about how to go about doing that effectively.
So I have to say that life is going pretty well. I was in a bit of a rut, towards the end of summer, but I think I'm breaking out of that now. If nothing else, at least I can find my spices.
Posted by Mark at 08:18 PM | Comments (1)
October 12, 2007
guests, cuse, mjp
We finally buckled down last night and finished the wedding guest list...at least the final version before we send it to parents for a last once-over. Save the Dates are scheduled to go out before Thanksgiving.
I found a nice website that lets you do a mail merge into photo postcards, and lets you design your own layout with a stripped-down web-based Quark-ish interface. It's a lot cheaper because you design it yourself, whereas a lot of the other places are basically charging you a premium to have one of their people help you with the design. Considering graphic design is what got me into web design in the first place, I don't think that's entirely necessary.
I might actually listen to my dad for once and get a car he recommends. But regardless, I'm not buying anything just yet...I don't need a new car, even if I like getting new toys now and then. Got a wedding to pay for.
We're planning the annual Syracuse basketball game trip, which has evolved out of Homecoming. We're better at basketball than football, and it's not like we ever go to any of the official Homecoming events anyway. Looks like we'll be up there for March 8th, so we'll sorta celebrate my birthday while we're there.
MJP looks to be officially moving back to MA. He's up here this weekend looking at condos. We'll do the usual drinks and catch up thing later tonight. Sox are on at 7, so it'll be somewhere with a TV.
Posted by Mark at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2007
fairs, animals, truck
We started the weekend by going to the Topsfield Fair, which is a local agricultural fair about on par with the Bloomsburg Fair. Maybe a little smaller, but it's been a long time since I've been to the Bloomsburg Fair, and you know how everything seems bigger when you're young.
Probably the highlight was the Robinson's Racing Pigs. Those pigs sure do race. And swim, too!
We were fairly well-behaved as far as food went, but I did have a nice kielbasa with peppers and onions from Mr. Kielbasa (which is funny because we know a real Mr. Kielbasa), and some fried dough, which is funnel cake without the funnel.
On Saturday we went up to Vermont for the Newfane Heritage Festival. We got a bunch of Christmas shopping done, and got some stuff for the house as well. I've been wanting a kitchen pot rack, since I hate trying to shove all the pots in a drawer, so we got a nice wrought-iron one from a blacksmith who works up there.
Also, we got a dish for the cat that we don't have just yet. But I got Kara to agree that we'll get a cat in the new year. Too hectic with the holidays, but once January rolls around, we're getting a kitty.
We did the usual "Super Raffle" which is really just their name for a Chinese Auction. Kara won a pottery cookie jar.
We rode around in a relative's Ford Explorer Sport Trac, which has the all-important sunroof in a king-cab pickup truck configuration. That got me thinking about vehicles. Since I'm about to put the one-hundred-thousandth mile on the Jetta, I figured I'd at least entertain the option of getting something else. So I did some research and determined that I want a Nissan Frontier. You can get a used one, recent model, for a decent price, and with all the options. Fuel economy isn't great, but it does have a small bed and room enough for five.
But of course I like not having car payments. So I think I've decided that I'll buy a new vehicle as a grad school graduation present for myself. I will keep up with the tradition of buying myself new vehicles whenever I get a new degree. That means I'll have to make the truck last until I get a PhD in something.
Posted by Mark at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)