Moving!

Ideally I would like to live in a big building with four wings surrounding an enclosure, with a garden and a nice fountain. Shaped like this:

My family and I would live in one wing, and in the other wings would live all our best friends.

We are not moving into that building. But we are moving into a condo in a group of buildings that looks like this:



As you can see, this group of condos is very similar to the building I would like to live in. As you can also see, there is a swimming pool, which is kind of like a very big fountain that happens not to be running. What you cannot see from this picture is that we will live here:



and that a group of some of our best friends lives here:



So that's a whole corner of my dream right there. Maybe if I dream harder it will spread until I have the whole thing.

One of the lives I wish I were living

is the life of this guy. He spent some years spending enough less than he earned that he can now live on withdrawals from his savings that total less than the interest (about 4%). He is retired, before the age of forty (except now for half an hour a day of copy editing), and spends all his time doing what he wants, and (this is the really cool part) what he wants is to volunteer his skills to add value to the world.

Every time I read this blog, I think about how inefficiently, slavishly, and selfishly I spend my time. Not that I want to accomplish anything as extreme as Jacob; I think setting myself up as a professional academic will have very nearly the same effects as would achieving complete economic freedom and then doing what I want. But I do want the level of self-mastery Jacob seems to have, instead of letting everything be dictated to me by outside demands (which in some cases include demands stemming from my past decisions, in case you were thinking of bringing up the Grackle as proof that I already have this self-mastery). I'm afraid of finding myself in the situation where I've worked to place and resenting the demands of the position (as I already often resent the demands of being a student) instead of living the life.

So, today, my focus is on bringing the love back to "love of wisdom."

note

I am going on vacation and will probably be taking a break from blogging, not that you would notice except for this post. Please eagerly await my glorious return and slowly realize that I will only disappoint you.

F(l)oo(re)d

My wife has noticed that since Buggle was born, her tolerance for dropped food has increased. I found this interesting but I didn't seriously think that the threshold of sanitariness could get much lower for an inveterate five-second-rule-stretcher such as I am. But I don't think that a year ago if someone had knocked a salad off my lap, I would have picked up every single piece of lettuce and sliced-side-down tomato off the carpet, plucked out a few balsamic cat hairs and enjoyed the salad as though nothing had happened.

I'm pretty sure I have to have this

The "updated classic" takes a shocking turn. 

I hope this is more fun than "All the World's a Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare " turned out to be.

too late + too soon = golden mediocrity

Some time ago, I put a sheet of paper with the words "do a blog" written on it into my "next action" files, at a position where (in theory), I would find it if and when all of my defined tasks had been duly dispatched, leaving all my files empty and me very smug, relaxed, and ready to brag. The idea was to make blogging into a jewel in the crown of leisure rather than a distraction from real work. But that obviously would have been too excellent for this blog. Instead, I arrived at that slip of paper only by sneakily inserting new next actions reminders behind it in the folder, and also by routinely ignoring all of my online actions folders until they atrophied into annoying, disorganized collections of meaningless bookmarks. And it still took me a month.

Nevertheless (and let me just bask in that word for a while...ah, feels good!), I'm pretty happy about the fact that I've turned not updating for a month from a source of irrational guilt to a source of mitigated pride.