I’ve decided one productive thing to spend some time on this weekend. It will fit in quite nicely with my desire to try and develop a bit of a green thumb, too!

Off the front of my room at home there’s a balcony. It’s quite sizable. I’ve relegated it to this point to a few sittings, as well as a holding area for my fan during the summer. Well, I have the urge to change all that. Sunday morning, I’m whisking Crista off to Ikea to go shopping for some summer deco and furniture. Yes, I can whisk her to Ikea, it’s practically a foreign county. In order are some hanging and other assorted pots, tea light lanterns, shades, deck rugs, and a tiny bistro breakfast set of table and chairs. Perhaps I’ll pick up a lounge at Target, too. My goal is to turn the balcony into a retreat I can actually spend time in to read this summer.

So keep an eye out, if I succeed I’ll post some before and after pictures.

My coworker and I just ran across the street to stretch our legs and grab some juice. I decided on a whim to try a wheatgrass shot from Robek’s Juice. It’s something I’ve always wanted to experience. Turns out it actually smells more like grass than it tastes. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to take it without chasing it down with juice. Would I try it again? Sure. Though that could change if I start retching like a sick dog in an hour.

The funny irony came in walking away from the shop. Here I was, a shot of wheatgrass in hand, and my coworker with his cigarette. The picture of health, eh?

I of course maintained the recommended first-shot-of-wheatgrass-caution. Always try it the first time near a secluded trash can. Fortunately our parking structure has a few.

I’m greatly interested in observing marketing in our society. Understanding how that marketing helps shape us is interesting, but sometimes, wondering how the marketing reflects society is even more so.

Case in point. Last Saturday, I visited the local Vons grocery store to pick up a card with an encouraging theme to it. Mind you, this store has quite a selection of cards, I think it spans one entire side of the aisle. I waded through the mass of birthday and graduation cards to find the “Special Occasions” section. This section takes up I suppose about 1/5 of all the cards. It’s not a tiny section. I looked for a card with the “Encouragement” label sticking out behind it, and found a sweet, understated one right away. It even fit my intentions perfectly. I’m glad, because, it was the only encouragement card I could find. And I’m not talking about labeled spots that were empty. I mean, you could tell, this was it.

Then I noticed a funny thing as I was leaving the aisle. There must have been at least seven cards, maybe more, with the theme of “Happy Birthday from the cat/dog”. So let me get this straight. Out of hundreds of cards, I found one on person-to-person encouragement. That’s at least six less than cards “from” creatures that don’t buy the card, can’t communicate in spoken language with humans, and have no intentions in ever engaging in funny birthday wishes.

That’s messed up.

We’re messed up.

So a few months ago I used eMusic for a couple months. I’ve always thought they had an interesting service. The main problem of course is their selection isn’t the greatest.

Lately I’ve been using my iPod in conjunction with some hour long natural sound tracks (I like raindrops) from the iTMS. They really help me relax and lessen my anxiety. Here’s the deal though. On the iTunes Music Store, any track longer than 10 minutes is only available if you buy the album. Since these tracks are about one hour, it’s one track per album. So that’s about $8-$10 a track. That’s a pretty penny.

I just found that eMusic has 16 such tracks. I also just found an email in my inbox that says I can rejoin for a month for free. eMusic counts 1 track as 1 download. So let’s do the math. 16 tracks x $9 per track average = $144 on iTMS. Or, with my free 30 day trial on eMusic, it’s uhh, free. That’s a deal.

What are five things I am currently ambivalent about?

1. Apologetic defenses of faith.
2. Playing and practicing guitar.
3. Exercise.
4. Computer programming.
5. Conditioning myself to travel more.

What are five things I currently do not like?

1. Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux flame wars.
2. Obfuscating dogmatism as certainty in “facts”.
3. Advertising by any soft drink manufacturer which implies sugar water can somehow improve your life.
4. Convergent thinking in absence of divergent thinking.
5. Overuse of loaded labels, such as liberal or conservative.