2 stalks of celery finely chopped 1 med to large onion coarsely chopped ½ green pepper finely chopped 1 clove garlic, minced 1 clove elephant garlic, minced 1 pound ground beef 1 can diced tomatoes (28 oz) 1 can tomato sauce (28 oz) 1 small can tomato paste
olive oil
chili powder cumin cayenne (red pepper) powder anise seed salt pepper sugar Worcestershire sauce
Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a large stew pot. Once it’s hot add the onions, green pepper and celery. Season with salt and pepper. Stir occasionally until the vegetable start to soften. Remove them from the pot and add the ground beef. Brown the beef and crumble. Season with salt and pepper. Once the meat is brown re-add the vegetables.
Add the tomato sauce, diced tomatoes and tomato paste. Stir to mix well. Re-season with more salt and pepper. Also add a pinch of sugar to cut the acid taste of the tomatoes.
I season without measuring so the following are just estimates. Experiment on your own until it tastes the way you want. Be careful tho… it will take a while for the hot flavors to become apparent, if you don’t wait a while after adding spice to taste test you can make it too hot to eat.
I generally start with a couple of tablespoons of chili powder. I almost always end up adding more later.
I put several good shakes of Worcestershire in, maybe a tablespoon.
A couple, three shakes of cayenne and cumin. Add a dozen or so anise seeds. Sometimes I toss a bay leaf in for grins.
Mix well and bring to a boil. Then reduce the heat and simmer with the lid on for several hours. Once your mouth is watering and you can’t wait any longer serve and eat.
Today was a singularly frustrating day. I?m in charge of two major projects, and heavily involved in at least two more. This in and of itself isn’t bad. Having more to do is better than having nothing to fill up the day. However, when you are constantly interrupted it is difficult to accomplish anything.
I think the lesson for me here is about control. I am torn between staying focused on my own task and responding to the need presented by whoever is interrupting me. When someone asks me a question or stops by my cubical I want to help them immediately. What I need to learn to do is take care of myself first. If I don’t take care of me, then any assistance I offer will be tainted by my upset. Not my upset at being interrupted, but rather my upset at ignoring my needs in the moment.
I’m currently reading a great book about programming. In the section about estimating the authors make a great point. They claim the best response to the question. “When will you be done?” is to say, “Let me get back to you on that.” The idea here is to take the time to assess the question and take care of your self before committing to an answer. In my present situation I need to learn to hear the person and their request, and then take the time to take care of myself before responding.
This may mean putting them off for a few minutes while I complete my current task. Or it might mean asking them to send me e-mail so I can take more time to formulate a response. In any event if I want to avoid the frustration of day like today, I need to focus on my needs first and foremost. And only when I have met them should I attempt to respond to the wants of others.
Today I learned what orthogonal means. Aren’t you impressed? You shouldn’t be. My industry (information technology) is filled with $5 words for $.10 items. The currently hot term at my client is persistence. Persistence is the activity of permanently storing objects so that they are available the next time your application runs. After a while you can get into saying things like, ?We?re going to persist this data to the DB2 database, whereas the rest is going to flat-files.?
Persistence is easy to spell and say. Always a good thing if you are inventing new technology meanings for previously existing words. Orthogonal is impossible to say, and just as hard to spell on the fly.
It’s stolen from geometry. The lines that make up the X and Y axes on a graph are orthogonal. They head in different directions. In the IT world the mean is slightly different. (Naturally.) An orthogonal design is one where changes to one component do not effect any other component. As a system, helicopters are very orthogonal. Change the pressure on one control and you must counter it with a different change on another control.
With computer system design you aim for interchangeable components. Ideally you should be able to swap the aging user interface with a newer one without completely re-writing the underlying system. Unfortunately, this rarely happens in the wild.
Maybe if it was easier to say orthogonal we’d be more persistent at making it our goal.
I’m very moody this evening. Michele and I had a fantastic weekend but the reality that is Monday has struck once again. I wish I could say that I’m happy everyday, but I’m not. I’m human and sometimes I’m down.
I know that we are all creatures of balance. When our balance is out of true, our emotions follow. Lately I have been struggling with my physical self. My mental image of my physical reality and me are different. As I approach my 40th birthday it is increasingly hard to ignore the physical reality. So I am physically out of balance.
Work is great these days. I am faced with new challenges and I am growing to meet them. Intellectually I am pleased with my self. The balance here shifts quite rapidly but on the whole I think I am well centered in my intellect.
For the past several years I have been searching for spiritual understanding. I have discovered a joy and satisfaction in expressing my spirit openly. Together with Michele I have explored and learned and grown. However we are both feeling the constraints of just two in our quest. It is time to open up to others and expand our journey. Without exposing our spiritual sides we cannot continue to grow. So there is imbalance here too.
If you are fortunate enough to be part of a couple do you ever think what it will be like when your companion dies? I’m not trying to be morbid here, just realistic. In my case my partner is older than I. We’ve talked and we both understand that she will in all likelihood precede me in death. This bothers both of us for different reasons.
I don’t like it for all the obvious reasons and a few that aren’t so clear. She hates it because she doesn’t want me to have to face her passing alone. Its ironic that the greatest tragedy I will face in my lifetime is one that takes away the one person I would turn to for support.
I know that I love my wife dearly. At no time is this more painfully clear than when I am afraid for her. Thoughts of her hurt or sick wound me deeply. Thoughts of her death leave me almost incapacitated. I know that death is a part of this life. I believe that my life, this time, is about growth. Facing her death and overcoming my grief and sorrow will require tremendous growth. More so as I will face that challenge alone. Her lifetime is about acceptance this time. She has to accept that her passing before me is the necessary order of events.
Part of me looks forward to that time when she dies. The hurts and demons that have plagued her throughout her life will be gone. The beautiful little girl inside her will be free forever to walk soft and touch the moon.
I feel hugely guilty when I think this thought, but I know that death isn’t forever. The essence that is my beautiful companion will return to a high plane. Until it is time for the next lesson, the next lifetime.
The rest of me is filled with sorrow at the thought of being alone in the world again.
Christmas has come and gone again. This year marked a decided change in my approach to this most difficult and wondrous of holidays.
Losing my sister on this day 27 years ago has scarred the day forever. In the past Christmas was a time to pick at the old scab and reopen the wound. My family doesn’t discuss this at all so the whole season has a repressed feeling of anger, sadness and hurt about it.
The last two years my wife and I have lived apart from the rest of my family and I was able to avoid their portion of the Christmas malaise. However, I wasn’t able to enjoy the season. I came to the realization that I had to accept responsibility for my part of this family tragedy.
In the past couple of years I have done tremendous work in letting go of the quilt, sorrow, and anger I’ve had about Amy’s death. I felt guilty since I had lived and she had not. I was only 12 when she died and therefore I wasn’t able to separate out the complex emotions that her dying created within me. For most of the past 27 years I have felt that I should have been the one to die. She was better in school than I. She would have made my parents prouder. All the silly sounding little things that a kid would feel. Left unchecked these thoughts built into a survivor’s quilt that crippled me in my dealings with my family.
I was sorrowful for obvious reasons. My sister had died and left me. I lost my playmate, my friend. I could see the hurt and sorrow this loss visited upon my family, my brother and my parents. I wanted to protect them from ever being that sad again. I tried to modify who I was and how I behaved so as not to upset them at all. Since these modifications weren’t my truth, and since they didn’t work anyway, I had been living a lie for many years. I was saddened by who I had become and how I was living. The despair was so great that I nearly ended it all just to get away from the pain.
I was angry at her for dying, and for dying on Christmas. As an adult I know she didn’t do this deliberately, but the little boy who was so lost and alone in the days and months that followed her death didn’t know and couldn’t understand. This childish anger was left unchecked and over the years it developed into a toxic, corrosive emotion within me.
Into this miserable thicket of darkness, fear, hurt, and anger came a ray of sunshine, the woman who is now my beautiful wife. She heard the pain in my voice and honored the process of grief that my inner child had to complete. Through her love she gave me a safe place to fall. A place where I could come apart at the seams and empty the enormous vat of emotions that I had carefully stored all these years. She never stopped me or judged me in what I was doing. She just loved me and held me through the terrible venting my soul needed to heal.
I was able to cry tears of sorrow and rage. I vented all the feelings that and been compressed inside me for so long. The process was brutally hard and often left me shattered and empty. My fear was that all I was and all I could be was contained in these feelings. If I opened myself up and let go of all these feelings what would I have left? Who would I be? Would I lose myself once and for all in the maelstrom I was unleashing?
I have discovered that when you let go of the anger, sorrow and guilt you recover. You get back the emotions of elation, love, and belonging that were hidden by the hotter emotions. I am now able to think of my sister and remember fondly the things we shared. I am at peace with her passing. I still morn her loss, but I can also celebrate the joy and laughter that was our time together.
This year I was able to honor her and my need for Christmas in a way that I’ve never done before. The holiday was no longer a sham of happiness. I felt like I was finally free to have fun and joy.
I owe so much to my wife. She has supported me throughout this process. I know from being her safe place to fall that the hardest thing in the world to do is stand by while your soul-mate is agonizing through a difficult lesson. The urge to step in and shoulder the burden for them is overpowering. I have also discovered that the true power of love is being the solid, unshakeable rock they stand upon while fighting their demons. I am truly privileged to be the rock for my Michele. And I am honored that she chooses to be the rock for me.
Today is the last work day before the Christmas holiday. Originally I had planned on working a full day, 8-5. I am taking an extra day off after Christmas that my client doesn’t. So I’ve got a nice 4-day weekend for the holiday in front of me.
My wife called a while ago and suggested that I might take off early and we could go to lunch and then just play. We’d get an early start on our plans. On the surface this sounds like a great idea but it brought up a whole raft of issues that I need to sort through.
I don’t do spontaneity well. Heck, I have a hard time saying the word. If we are out and about on a Saturday and my wife suggests a trip to a neighboring city I have a very hard time allowing that to happen. It is as if I get up in the morning and decide right then what I am going to do that day. If I get up knowing that we are going to travel then I am fine with it and enjoy myself. But if we weren’t planning on a trip then I react to it’s suggestion with a surprising resistance.
Today this issue is about letting myself take time off from work. I am an independent contractor and therefore I don’t get paid if I don’t work. This really isn’t the issue but it is a convenient starting place. As we say in my house, it’s a great avoidance.
Beyond that initial avoidance is a fear of approval. In my current situation I want the approval of my client and I feel that staying here and working a full day is the way to gain this approval. On the other side of the equation is wanting to please my wife. Taking the afternoon off and spending it with her has the potential to please her greatly, and to be a lot of fun. However, if I take off just to please her, when I privately feel I should be a work, I’ll be passive-aggressive all afternoon and that won’t be fun for either of us.
It boils down to deciding what my mood and motivation is today. Do I need to be at work to feel good about myself? Or am I staying here just because I think someone else feels I should? If I go home will I be doing that because I truly want to, or will I be doing it to try and gain favor from my wife?
If I do either action solely to gain some outside approval then I have failed the lesson. I am the only person who can truly approve or disapprove of my own actions. People around me can comment on my actions all they want, I control whether I am effected by those comments.
The action (staying at work or taking the afternoon off) isn’t the true point here. The true focus is the motivation and emotion behind the action. Being a child of technology (IE a hard science) and a male to boot, focusing on the emotional basis for a decision is not my default approach. Incorporating the emotional side of life is a relatively new thing for me. I like the results when I do it. I feel more balanced. More integrated.
Still it is a new paradigm.
Change sucks.
Well, I’ve made my decision. Time to act upon it.
Enjoy your holiday….
I had occasion to park in a downtown, underground garage today. It is in a central location so it sees a fair amount of business. Upon arriving at the gargare I punched the button and got my time-stamped ticket. Its a small affair, not quite the size of a business card.
When I was finished with my errands and lunch I returned to my car and proceeded to the exit booth. While the car in front of my completed their transaction I momentarily placed the ticket between my lips while I fished my wallet out of my pants pocket. It was only between my lips for 10 or 12 seconds, and it wasn’t really in my mouth, just between my lips.
When I pulled up to the gate and held my ticket out the man in the booth physically backed away from it, as if I’d offered him a live asp. As I continued to hold my ticket out he was looking around his booth for some thing. Finally he picked up his sweatshirt and gingerly reached for the ticket with his hand encased in the material of his pullover. I couldn’t believe it. Once he had the ticket he proceeded to vigorously rub it between the folds of his pullover for 20 or 30 seconds; all the while challenging me to say something with his stare.
Finally, when I didn’t rise to his bait he fished the ticket out of his makeshift set of gloves using only his fingernails on the smallest possible corner of the ticket.
I was thrilled to be able to pay him with the slightly damp paper money I’d gotten in change at my lunch a few minutes earlier. Oddly enough he didn’t treat the money as a toxic waste. I guess money is safe from germs, I mean, its only in and out of pockets all day. Whereas my parking ticket had touched my lips for the briefest moment and now was a carrier of who knows what plague.
For some 17 years I have made my living working with computers. I have been writing software of one form or another for 23 years. While I am not holding myself out as a guru or expert I like to think that I know more than the average home computer user. What I want to know is what does the average Joe do when faced with the always cryptic messages and dialogs that appear when the denizens inside the computer decide not to get along.
Most people view their computer as “one” thing. Sure it has 4 physical parts (the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and CPU), but they all work together, so it’s just “the computer.” However, inside the computer are several different electronic parts containing a few hundred components, and running on this hardware is a vast collection of programs. Each program is its own universe of complexity. Just the operating system on most computers is a miracle of modern engineering. Millions of lines of code working in forced harmony with each other to provide you, the computer user, with an unparalleled experience playing Solitaire.
So when “it” breaks where do you start?
Recently I bought a network router for my home computer network. Basically this gizmo (a highly technical term meaning I know what it is but not well enough to explain it in English) allows all the PC’s on your network to share one Internet connection. If you work on a PC in an office setting you are most likely using a router without even being aware of it. At home I have a nifty cable modem which allows hackers and other nefarious types 24-hour a day access to my valuable personal files (mostly my FreeCell scores). Prior to the router we had been using a software solution the required two network cards in one of the PC’s. One to communicate with the Internet, and the other to communicate with the LAN. This solution worked, but it made the one PC very unstable. Frequent daily crashes were not uncommon, and to make matters worse it often took multiple re-boots to get the whole thing up and running again. A better solution had to be found. Enter the router.
(One of the joys of a dedicated, high-speed Internet connection is that it works both ways. You can send and receive data to the Internet, and the Internet can send and receive data from you. If you are worried about such matters, and I am, you install anti-virus software and things like firewalls to keep the Internet out unless you invite it in. In my case the combination of the firewall and the software that shared the connection was more than my elderly computer could handle.)
This router gizmo is in effect a computer. There is no interface other then the various ports where the network cables can be inserted. The idea is simple. You hook the Internet connection to the router and all the PCs to the router and magic happens. All the PC’s on the network appear to have their very own connection to the Internet. No longer is the whole thing dependent upon one PC’s shaky stability. And, as a bonus, the router acts as a firewall by hiding all the PC’s on the local network from the Internet. (Who knew that as kids playing “hide-and-seek” we were really practicing for life on the Internet?)
The first step was to remove the extra network card and associated software from the shaky PC. Then make all the hardware and wire connections and hit the power switch. Almost immediately the connection is configured and we are on the Internet via the router. Excellent. Now on to the other PC on the network.
Make the connection between the other PC and the router using the brand-new cat-5 cable, turn on the PC and, no connection. Okay. Now what? Read the directions for the first time. I am, after all, a guy. We “know” how to do this stuff without the directions. It’s just like hooking up the cable, TV, VCR and stereo. And that works just fine. Well, sort of fine. Okay, it works some of the time as long as you understand 45 buttons on three different remotes. But that is another article.
The PC booted just fine. No error messages, no cryptic messages, and no Internet access either. First I redid all the connections. If you do them harder the second (third, fourth?) time it’ll work. Still no connection. Now, I know enough about networking and the arcane language of network addressing (TCP/IP) to be really dangerous. I was able to figure out that the network card in the second PC didn’t have the right address. But for reasons I couldn’t figure out it wouldn’t take the right address even when I entered it. Oh, I could change it to anything I wanted it just wouldn’t talk to the router. I even swapped cables to make sure that wasn’t the problem.
Several hours passed. My simple little change that was going to improve our home connection to the Internet was just going to “take a few minutes, Honey.” Ha! By now, of course, it is past the time that the “customer service” people go home. No matter when you finally throw in the towel and decide to call for help it is just past the quitting time of the person with the answer. But I called anyway because I love spending 10 minutes listening to various cryptic phone menu choices and canned elevator music. In the end I went to bed.
The very next day I started all over and got the same results. I repeated this a couple of time just to make sure the computer was playing a joke on me. My wife tells me that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Reminded of this fact, I decide to call the support people again. After 30 minutes on hold I get to leave my name and number for a callback within 2-4 hours. This never materialized. Support people get their jokes from the same place as the PC, apparently.
Finally, with the help of a friend who wasn’t personally involved with my battle-to-the-death, we were able to sort it out. Turns out there were two problems. The cable was bad, but the network card was also setup incorrectly. With the card wrong I couldn’t see any difference in the cable used. With the card right and the bad cable in place it looked (to me) like the card was wrong. Once the card was right, swapping the cable completed the connection. Now my wife can get all the spam she wants again.
The moral of the story is this; never buy a computer. Seriously, computers are a massively complex collection of hardware bits and software bytes. Getting so many different pieces from many different vendors and manufacturers to work at all is a minor miracle. Getting them to work long enough for you to play along with ABC’s “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” is a major miracle.
My advice is to cultivate a geeky friend who spends all of his or her time immersed in the depths of computers and the Internet. When your setup fails skip all the phone calls and troubleshooting and invite your personal geek over for Jolt-cola and pizza, and while they are there casually mention that your router gizmo isn’t fram-a-staning with the network wonky-do and could they sacrifice a sheep for you to fix it?
Today I lost my job. This is my birthday weekend and I had taken Friday off as a present to myself. Midway through the morning I got a call from a work mate suggesting that I might want to come in to the office. When I asked why he said they were letting people go. He had been let go. I lost all the feeling in my limbs. In that moment I entered a free fall, the elevator cable had snapped. The world, once sharp and stable around me, had suddenly become blurry and frightening.
The drive into my office passed quickly. There was a small group of my fellow employees by the door as I drove past to the parking lot. The knot in my stomach grew at the sight of them, and I couldn’t bring myself to look any in the face. As I walked into the building we all muttered furtive hellos. We were all unknowns to each other. I didn’t know if they were staying or going, and they didn’t know that about me. Suddenly people I had worked with were strangers. They were ’them’. And I was a ’them’ as well.
Upstairs I searched out my immediate supervisor. The room felt chaotic and tense. Walking up to him I bluntly asked, “Do I pack or do I stay?” I could tell by the instance of pain on his face that I was packing. The free fall was now complete. No parachutes, no way out, please keep your hands and feet inside the elevator until it completely crashes in the basement.
Things that had been important only a few hours ago no longer mattered. The dentist appointment two days out was no longer looming large in my anxiety. My fears about my latest work assignment melted away. I no longer had any work assignments.
My anger slipped a few times getting through the severance process. I had little or no patience for the party line about why this was necessary. Looking at the corporate hatchet man I said, “I don’t need to hear your confession, I can’t give you absolution. You have to live with what you’ve done to all these lives today.”
Coming home and telling my wife that I had lost my job was devastating. It felt like I had failed us, like I had failed her. She spoke the only words that could have made a difference, “I love you. I believe in you.” The process of understanding had begun. We spent the rest of the day exploring our rage, tears, sorrow, laughter, fears and hopes. We believe in the TAO, that all things happen for a reason. We know that all events, joyous or traumatic, bring with them a gift. The trick to growing in this lifetime is to discover the gifts and incorporate them into you.
I have yet to discover what gift this trauma brings with it. I know that I will pass through the fire and emerge on the other side stronger for having been tempered by its heat. Yesterday is only a memory. Tomorrow is still a dream. Here and now all I have is today. Here and now I lost my job. Here and now I have gained my freedom to explore and grow.