Hurray for Halloween!

Tomorrow is Halloween, and I am psyched. I love Halloween. I hate people who try to ruin it by putting their theological baggage on it or who try and destroy it by taking it over to make it an adult thing or by trying to hurt the kids, who are just out having a great time, getting candy, wearing costumes - the ultimate kids' dream. To me, it is just a fun holiday with good memories from my childhood. I look forward to it all year, and love to open the door over and over again to the choruses of "Trick or treat!", exclaiming to the amassed hoards how pretty all the princesses are and how scary all the goblins are, and "Here, have lots of candy! Happy Halloween!"

So, to anyone reading this, "Happy Halloween!" May it be safe for you and yours, may all your costumes work out and may your bags be full of all the candies you love.

[And for a great post on Halloween, see the always perfect Sippican Cottage.]

Two things that didn't make the list

While going though my current life inventory and near-future planning process (not to say "Soviet Five Year Plan" :-), I was struck by two things that were missing, that certainly would've made the list in earlier years. The first was work/career, and the second was formal education/certification. Let me expand on both of these and why they're not in the plan now.

My work is important to me - I like what I do and I am good at it, I have a good job (I've certainly had much worse), and I make a good living and can support my family well enough for our needs (I have no goals to be rich). I get a lot of training and work with current technologies so my resume stays fresh. All well and good. But in the past I would have felt the need to put some sort of career goals on my list of things to improve and work on. To "climb". Not now. For one, my career's been "flat" for over a decade now. I have pretty much reached the upper limits of where I can go without becoming pure management (or "manglement", as I call it), and I know I don't want to go there. I don't "feed" on that. I don't mind leading people or mentoring someone, but I know I don't want to be the one that does nothing but have meetings, plan budgets and hear excuses. So my salary has been pretty flat for the past 10 years (and in fact has shrunk a bit, especially counting inflation), but considering many of my peers really took a hit post-dot-bomb, I am lucky. I am thankful I have a job, and a good one at that, and I like what I do, and...that's good enough for now. Maybe I'll change my mind at some point in the future.

On the second point, education and/or certification, I have been ambivalent for years. Perhaps because I dropped out of high school for a period of time, then took a G.E.D. (high school equivalency test) and only thought I'd be something like a clerk when I was young, I long felt the need to prove myself. When I finally did go to college at 22, while married, with child and working full time, I made straight A's because I was motivated and knew what I wanted to do and received the confidence and mentoring that allowed me to believe that maybe I really was smart after all. Since then I have gone back and forth on whether to go back to school and pursue other degrees, perhaps in areas outside of my work, just for the interest of it. And lately, while thinking about working with the poor, I've thought about going to school to study social work and the like. I have decided (for now) not to do any of that. It isn't that education is a bad thing - it's great. But for me, being mostly an autodidact from very young, I realized that any further formal education right now would be a side trip, a way to actually delay doing what I want to do while pretending I was pursuing it. So onto the back burner it goes.

Neither of the above has to be permanent, but my focus now is on other things. Perhaps it is just a sign of me getting older, and shifting focus on to things that are of more import for my age, leaving the career ladder climbing and degree bagging to those younger and more ambitious. It certainly isn't because I want to kick back and relax - I think my goals are going to make me busy enough - busier than I've been in years. But now I am concentrating on things that count to me, not to the world. So I am leaving the world's methods of measurement behind. The interesting thing is how free that's made me feel.

Soviet Five Year Plans

"Nothing gets done unless it gets done on purpose."
- Aaron.

"Time's going to pass anyway."
- Cheryl (ex-wife)

The first quote is from my friend Aaron (just Aaron), and its point is that we all say we want to do this or that in our lives, but it is only when we make plans and take steps to get them done that we accomplish anything. It should not be confused with the fact that whether we plan or not life will still go on, but instead is pointing out that if something is important to us and takes effort to accomplish, it will only happen if we make it happen (God willing).

The second quote is one of the few words of wisdom I can take away from a bad marriage. The subject was people who will talk about how they want to reach a particular goal - changing careers, getting a degree, whatever - but complain it will take too long and do nothing to reach it. The point being, "that time is going to pass anyway", meaning if you just sit and complain about how long it will take and do nothing, well, in five years you still won't have your goal, but the amount of time it would have taken to get there went by anyway, and there you are.

Now balance both of the above, which I believe to be true, with my own life experience with "Soviet Five Year Plans". That is what I call the attempts in my life to sit and decide what's important to me now and plan out the next stage of my life and how to get there. The reason I call them that is because each attempt has had about as much success as the original Soviet Five Year Plans, which is to say, not much at all. Every time I have gone through the exercise, within six months my life's circumstances had altered so much through job change, geographical change, marital change or whatever as to render the plan ludicrous. Or to put it another way, life "just happened" and my plans were not resilient enough to handle that.

And yet I still believe nothing happens unless it happens on purpose, and that if I don't make a plan to reach my goals over the next few years that the time will pass anyway. So I am in the process of setting out some goals for myself and figuring out how to get there. Many are items that have been rumbling along on my plate for some years now, in the "I need to get around to that some day" category, and some are changes I want to make in my self to improve my life, marriage, family, health and my ability to follow Christ.

A long time ago (like, in the 1980s) I studied the Franklin time management method. One thing I liked about their approach was the top-down, life-goals-down-to-daily-details method of deciding what was important in your day-to-day life (since the system worked off of prioritized task lists, it was crucial to know how and what to prioritize). To sum up what I remember, they started with having you construct an overview of what was important to you in your life. It could be any set of things - money, health, love, security, career, travel, learning, and so on. From there, you identified specific long-term goals you wanted to reach for your crucial categories. For example, if financial security was important to you, you could decide that retiring comfortably by age 60 was a long-term goal. Then you came up with more intermediate goals, for example, goals for then next five years, and then goals for the next year.

At this point you could start getting into the nitty gritty of daily planning. Because if you had goals for the current year, then you have a good handle on knowing what you have to accomplish this month to get them done. And if you know what you need to do this month, then you should be able to tell what needs to be done this week, and ultimately today. And in the end, you had a prioritized task list of things that needed to be done today, with all of it tied up to your ultimate long-term goals. Sounds laudable, doesn't it? Too bad my mind and life don't work that way! :-)

But I have started setting down some long-term goals, because it's been a long time since I did that type of self-examination, and it is interesting to see what's coming out. It is interesting to see what actually comes out as important when you explicitly start to think about it, and weighing competing priorities against a finite amount of time (both in terms of daily life and lifespan). I may post more on that later. I want to get it more orderly and figured out before I put it here, though. Perhaps I will use this blog to help chart and track some of the goals, progress, successes and failures along the way. Making such things public is a well-known technique for helping stay on course.

Anyway, I would appreciate any comments from readers about how you've gone about pursuing your life's goals. Do you use a specific system? Do you just organically let life happen? Either way, are you happy with the results?

Family update

Well, my daughter's search for a job is ongoing, but things have lightened up a bit around here, mostly because I've had a change of attitude and approach. I reached out to a group of friends and asked their advice and got a lot of it, all of it good, some of it quite insightful and deep. Toward that end, we're keeping our daughter on the job-hunting track (her first interview is this afternoon - yay!), but we've also started the process of enrolling her in the local university both Les and I attended (and in fact, met at, 25 years ago). In addition, I've told her if she doesn't have a job by the 31st, then she can volunteer instead. My thoughts are (a) there is a much lower barrier to entry volunteering than getting employed, so really all she has to do is pick something and go (and I'll make sure she goes :-), (b) it still gets her out of the house and away from sitting and surfing and focusing on herself all day, and (c) it satisfies my requirement for her being productive. Once school starts, that will count, too.

Ultimately, it isn't what she does that's important right now - I believe it's that she does something, anything, just to quit sitting and stewing and surfing and sliding along.

Update

So, pending good results on a drug test on Mon. (which will be fine - she hardly even drinks), my daughter will have a part-time seasonal job taking phone orders at Scholastic Books (you know, the people that publish the Harry Potter books, as well as those children and young teen books you used to order in elementary school - they are HQed here in Jeff City). It looks to be 30-36 hours a week, and that's enough hours to satisfy my "be productive" rule. She took day shift to keep the transport load on me down, although it meant losing shift differential. Since she is planning on going back to college in Jan., the "seasonal" part works out Just Fine. She's happy and excited and so am I. If all goes well next week, she starts November 5th. Woohoo!

10-20-30

Glenn tagged me with "the 10-20-30 virus", where we're supposed to tell what we were doing 10, 20 and 30 years ago. And let's just say right here I am happier now than at any of the times below. Here goes:

10 years ago:

I was living in Lakewood, Colorado (the third time I'd lived in Colorado - perhaps not the last?) and telecommuting as chief software architect for a company in Montreal. I was trapped in a bad marriage of which I would like to say nothing. I was still militantly agnostic (see below). This was also the height of my hiking, backpacking and mountaineering days.

20 years ago:

I was living in the Kansas City metro area, in the second year of my first job as a programmer. I was militantly agnostic. This was also near the time of my last suicide attempt, the one that scared me straight, so to speak, because it was the one that almost worked. Not a happy time.

30 years ago:

I was a "senior" at Boulder High School in Boulder, Colorado. My grade level is in quotes because I had returned after being a drop-out for a year, having taken a double load of summer school to catch up. I missed graduating in 1978 with my class by only three credit hours out of 150, and instead of taking summer school again I just took a G.E.D. and was done with it. I played bass in the school stage (jazz) band, even though I couldn't (and still can't) read music. I was a socially-outcast, long-haired, bandanna-wearing, pot-smoking, foosball-playing ne'er-do-well with suicidal tendencies and no self esteem. Was questing for God, and found Him, although I later lost Him for almost 20 years (but luckily He didn't lose me!).

I tag Aaron, Lyn, Dan, Tom and Tina.

What's going on (part two)

So, lately I talked about one of the things going on here, and how that had our minds occupied for a while (and hence has slowed down my blogging). Another "occupation" has also been happening, and that's the appearance of my 21 (and a half) year old daughter in our house. I can't quite call her a "boomerang child", because she was raised entirely by her late mother. When her mom died three years ago I invited her to come live with us, but she chose to stay with her mom's best friend (and executor). That lasted a while, until they finally made her move out on her own, get a job, etc. Which also lasted for a while, until she got fired/quit. Basically, since then she's bounced around from couch to couch now for two years, and the problem comes down to the fact she doesn't want to be an adult - she just wants to surf the Net and hang out and let others support her.

For years now I've prayed to God to help her find her way to adulthood. I read somewhere that we should never pray for anything we aren't willing to have God use us to make happen, so I figure this is my prayers, answered. She has basically run out of places to stay (one more aunt who's going through a divorce is left, and that's about it), and now we have her. And while I didn't have a hand in raising her, I think my responsibility is to try and get her to grow up as much as possible (she has the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old, if that) and become a self-reliant adult.

Toward that end I have made it clear that if she doesn't get a job, and soon (I've set a deadline of Oct. 31), then she is going to have to find somewhere else to live. That's it - one rule (well, she also has to eat dinner with the rest of the family). Except for doing her own laundry she doesn't have to help with chores (the kids do that for their allowance). She doesn't have to pay us rent. She simply has to be productive. I've told her that Les and I work full-time and the kids are all in school learning, and I am not going to have her just hang out at home and surf. She must work. If she decides to go back to school at the university here in town, that's cool, too, and she can stay with us during that. But she must be productive - period.

The only way I can see for someone to become an adult, especially if they weren't raised to be one, is to force some reality on them. She doesn't want to work, I know, but that falls on pretty deaf ears with me (I was an emancipated minor at 17 - I've never had any options but work, even while attending college). So I am willing to give her a safe, loving environment in which to live while she figures out some things, but she has to be engaged in the Real World of work (or school) while she's doing it.

I have been taking her various places like the mall during the day and dropping her off so she can pound the pavement door to door filling in applications (with only a high school diploma her options are pretty much retail, fast food and minor clerical - unless she decides to join the military, which won't happen). Other than on the weekends, when she is to look in the classifieds, I come home from work at lunch and take her somewhere every afternoon for three to four hours of (I hope) job hunting. If that doesn't work, I am going to start making her go with the kids and me when I take them to school in the morning, and she will then have to tell me where she wants to hang out all day and I will drop her off there, because I will not just have her stay at home and slack.

That's it - I don't think I'm being unfair. Do you?

These are days that you’ll remember (part 2)

After reading Chuck Warnock's blog post on lectionary reading today, I sent him an email about how I had written JavaScript to produce the daily readings (for my denomination, anyway) from any Web page. The details for using it on your church Web site are in my original post. If your church uses the American Bible Society's forministry.com as a host, then they've graciously made the code available as a publicly shared item. If you look at the footer of this blog you can now see it in action on a blog as well. To get it to work in Blogger, I simply created an HTML/JavaScript type page element on the Edit Layout page and then inserted the following code:

<div id="easter"></div>
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://dullroar.com/scripts/simpleeaster.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById("easter").innerHTML = GetReadingsAsHTML(new Date());
</script>

The <div> element misnamed "easter" (a leftover from when I was testing the original code) is simply somewhere to put the results of calculating the daily reading. The following two <script> elements are what do the magic. The first pulls in my script from my personal Web site. I would appreciate it if you are going to use this code that you host it yourself to keep my bandwidth charges down. My only request is that you leave the comments in the code concerning authorship intact. You would then change the src attribute to point to where you placed it on your own Web site, for example src="http://awebsiteofmyown.com/simpleeaster.js". The second <script> element sets the results of calling the GetReadingsAsHTML function with today's date into the "easter" <div>. It's just that simple!

Caveat programmer: If the browser is being run on a machine that has the date inaccurately set, then it will calculate a reading for the date set on the machine, since all of this happens in the browser. Also, while I've made every attempt to have this work everywhere, it has only been tested in the United States. There were quite a few bugbears getting it to work around daylight savings time, etc., and I am not guaranteeing that it will work in every time zone in the world. Also, if the lectionary readings do not match your denomination's lectionary, sorry about that. If you are good at JavaScript it isn't hard to change them. If you have any questions, feel free to post them as a comment here and I will try and help you out. If anyone can get this working in Wordpress, I'd appreciate a comment here showing how, so others can make use of it, too.

Hope it helps.

What's going on (part one)

[With apologies to Marvin Gaye - I have given up the gimmick of naming every blog post out of the lyric of a song, but once in a while I still have to, just because pop/rock/bluegrass/jazz/big band/classical/alternative/alternatwang/fuzz/grunge/rap/oh-yeah-and-some-cool-Christian-music defines the listening habits of this household. Life's too short to listen to crap music.]

Lots has been happening here at la Casa Lehmer. With the kids now in the same parochial school that taught their mother, aunt and uncles and maternal grandmother, there's lots of homework every night. Plus we're getting into extra-curricular activities more as time goes on (right now Cub Scouts and Brownies for the twins - still waiting to see what the growing-up-too-fast 11 year old wants to do this year). And work, of course. And volunteering at the food pantries. And the church Web site. And...whatever.

Then God decides to throw some things just to make sure we're on our toes and know that life is precious but also hard work. First, with this post we'll start with Les. I made her go to the doctor about four weeks ago now because once every month or so she would violently vomit for no reason. We'd ruled out food, pregnancy or other environmental factors, so finally I told her, "You've spewed more in the past year than I have in my entire adult life (especially without provocation, as in ethanol overdose). Go to the doctor."

So she did. He decided the symptoms were decidedly gall bladder-like, and had her go in for an ultrasound. That ended up with us getting a call about four weeks ago saying there was a "cyst" on one of her kidneys, and she needed to have a CT ("cat") scan. Les, being a nurse (inveterate hypochondriacs, all), immediately launched into Internet research and found every dire disease on the planet related to kidneys. Me, being who I am, decided I am not going to worry about it until there's a definite diagnosis, and started doing what I do to handle stress and the unknown - make dry and not so dry jokes (the Midwest is full of people who handle stress and tragedy that way - listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" every Saturday, like we do, and hear in Garrison Keillor's voice your grandfather(s) telling dry/wry stories about heartache and pain, making light of the tragedies to endure them).

So a week later it was a CT scan, and after waiting from that Thursday until the following Monday to hear the news, the "cyst" became a 2.2cm "mass", and she then needed to have an MRI. So my jokes went to "Well, at least you have two kidneys" and "I've always dug bald chicks" (Lehmers are not renowned for their sense of decorum :-).

The MRI was done on yet another Thursday, and we had to wait until the following Monday to hear the news about that. I figured they were only doing the MRI as a formality, to chart where they needed to go in surgically. And of course, we had to wait the whole weekend for the report, which included our seventh anniversary that Friday. Anyway, they then called and said, "You have an appointment with a urologist on Friday." Which, to me, was hopeful, because it wasn't, "You have an appointment with a surgeon to schedule surgery tomorrow." So we waited through all of last week until Friday, went in to the urologist, and after looking at the CT scan and MRI, he said, "I think it's a cyst." Which is good news. As he explained, cysts on kidneys are really no big deal - now that they have better imaging, they're finding that cysts are so common that 50% of people over 60 have them.

However, it is an "unusually shaped" cyst, which is why the radiologist and our G.P. were concerned, so it will be CT scans every three months for a while, just to make sure it is not growing (growing means cancer). But me? I am willing to take all of this as an answered prayer.

End of part one.

Free Burma!

Imaginary friends

Perhaps the Internet isn't such a Good Thing after all (there's an original idea!). I wonder if the "community" it engenders is "real" or not. Today I feel rather curmudgeonly and think "not". While I use the Net to keep in daily contact with friends and family around the world, it has also allowed religious misfits like me to reach out and communicate with other misfits. Then we can feel like, "Hey! I'm not alone after all! There must be something to what I am thinking/feeling!"

Except, in the olden days of yore, we would have been alone, isolated. And we would have either festered in that, or else tried to be part of the local (church) community. Now, through the help of the Internet, we can resign/retreat/stand off from the local (church) community because we can find others online that like to gripe about the same things we do. Instead of doing anything about the local (church) community, including being a part of it, we simply secede from the real people around us and convince ourselves we're part of a larger "online community".

Which in some way is true, I guess, but in reality I think is mostly self-serving horseshit. Because it allows us to pick and choose our community, instead of having to simply deal with those that we can actually be with locally, those that God puts directly in our path and challenges us to forgive, befriend and love.

Christ dealt with with imperfect people like me, and you, and those people that don't agree with either of us. He didn't tell His followers to build an insular group of the like-minded (Pharisees, anyone?), all saying "Me, too!" to each other, but instead to get out and engage the world. So while much of the Christian blogosphere right now seems to be in tumult about whether this or that internecine snipe is valid or loving or Christlike, the mere fact we're all nattering away at each other in a virtual space instead of being out in a community of real people, breaking bread and truly communing shows that standing back and posting "That person isn't being a very good Christian" isn't being a very good Christian, either.

Retreating into cyberspace is not the answer. Even if it feels good to all the introverts out there, like me.