It's Better in Wyoming.

"Explaining the jet engine or the wing of a 787 doesn't destroy the awesome beauty of flight.  It doesn't break the dream.  It does the opposite.  The more you understand of science, the more you marvel at the magic of reality, and creating the dream is not the same as perpetuating ignorance.  It is the opposite: taking people inside, letting them see behind the scenes, showing them how it all works." --Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent

i like doing dishes.  i don't like thinking about doing dishes, though.  i put the task off longer than necessary, usually, but when i'm actually doing dishes i find it relatively peaceful and satisfying activity.  i also like having the dishes done , and a clean countertop.  doing half of the dishes and then leaving the rest doesn't make sense to me, since it still leaves some dishes cluttering the countertop, and not much sense of accomplishment.  i've had two roommates now who could be categorized as "partial dish-doers": they would either just do their "share" of dishes, or they'd randomly quit at some point when they'd done "enough."  weird, if you ask me, but i suppose it's allowed me to recognize that i can't expect other people to share the same values for doing things that i have.  for a person who doesn't get any psychological benefit from doing dishes, i understand that the difference between doing 1 dish, o...

god grant me the ability to recognize the difference between generous optimism and pure delusion. tonight this prayer is directed (mostly) to my recurring, seasonal job frustrations.  i'm pretty sure that  learning is a noble task, but i'm not always convinced that teaching achieves that same nobleness of purpose.  and i'm really pretty sure that the going-through-the-motions that characterizes a lot of formalized education doesn't even come close.

"I can promise you milk and cookies, but if the oven's broke, you just get milk."-Ninth-grader Urail King, in the film version of Freakonomics *** In other news, I'm not much of a killer.  Steph discovered when she was here last weekend that we had a mouse on the loose; she spotted one running behind the kitchen sink just before bedtime.  So I put out some traps, and a day later when I was pointing out the traps to Josh one of them was not where I'd placed it.  Turns out, the mouse had caught a leg in the trap and had dragged himself under the fridge.  We fished him out with a coat hanger, and Josh turned it loose in the yard--more towards the neighbor's house than ours. A day later I decided to make sandwiches and discovered a perfectly mouse-sized hole in the bread. I assumed, optimistically, that the hole was made before we'd caught the mouse in the trap. This weekend, Josh left some biscuits on the stove, and discovered that we apparently sti...