Month: October 2018

Day 89: “King Sugar Cane,” a Halloween Rhyme

Chris

Happy Halloween!  No doubt the fact that I haven’t been eating processed sugar (or grains) for 2 1/2 weeks had something to do with writing tonight’s rhyme 🙂  I hope you like my pitter-pattery sugar expose…   “King Sugar Cane” Halloween, rowdy teens dressed as howling fiends, prowling for sweets, now we meet as we creep down the street, costume ghosts and ballerinas. Now you see us, soliciting candy A Twix’ll be dandy, a fistful is handy, all you can grab, blame your dad, that you can’t stop eating that…

Day 88: Allowing the Rough Edges

Chris

This post is about allowing things to be imperfect.  First of all, let me define what “imperfect” means.  In this discussion, imperfect is anything my mind deems to be “out of place,” or “not as ideal as it can be.”  It’s a judgment, and I make it up. My mind is full of judgments.  It is full of assessments and opinions about how things should be.  That is the standard, however made up, misguided, or wrong-headed, I am using here.  An example just came up as I was giving the…

Day 87: Reaching for Satisfaction (Part 5)

Chris

I know I have written an awful lot about Satisfaction.   I find that this is an ongoing focus of mine that just continues to be interesting!  I am committed to mastering it in my own life, and truthfully, I just can’t see how the topic can get old.  Can one ever get enough of looking for things to feel good about? I don’t think so!  🙂 I have spent A LOT of time thinking about big dreams, huge dreams, astronomical dreams.  Although this has often led to constructive action, sometimes…

Day 86: Re-Living (and Relieving) School Woes

Chris

My wife is an amazing photographer and digital artist, and she loves working on her iPad or iPhone making art.  She has become a specialist in using apps for this purpose, and she has now turned this skill into a class she teaches at City College of Sacramento called “Digital Content Creation.”  Partly to support her and partly because I’m genuinely interested in the subject, I am enrolled in the course too.  It’s been enormously valuable so far, as I have been learning how to use my phone (an Android)…

Day 85: Three Raps from the Past

Chris

My first year here in Sacramento was the year I got married.  During that year, each week I wrote and recorded raps.  Thanks to regular Skype calls with my friend, English rapper Martin Lavender (aka “Lord Lav”), I had a weekly reason to create something new and send it to him.  I have an entire collection of them sitting on my computer, mostly unheard by the rest of the world. Today I would like to share three raps from that period: “Positively Awesome,” “Life is Beautiful,” and “Carefree.” As their…

Day 84: Performance, a Force to Be Reckoned With

Chris

Tonight I will be playing piano with a troupe of comedians who will be improvising an entire, complete with story, characters, and musical numbers.   The only thing we will know ahead of time is the title, which the audience will choose the moment before we start the show. It is only the second time I have ever done a show like this (the first time was last month), so needless to say, it’s still a learning experience!  Last month was really fun, and I’m looking forward to tonight as well.…

Day 83: Going through my process

Chris

So I got to Day 83 on this journey.  That’s closing in on 1/4 of the way through the year-long project.  Hurray! That means I can type words up daily and post them.  Congratulations, that is a first in my online career. At the same time, I wonder about my attitude about sharing this blog.  I mean, certainly I share each post on Facebook, and so a few friends or family are seeing this.  But obviously, most of my Facebook friends don’t automatically see it.  Other than that, I have…

Day 82: Staying Grounded in the Middle of the Turmoil

Chris

I got a little bit of a shock today when I checked my phone and saw that the stock market had gone down 3%.  And not for the first time in recent days:  I saw a similar drop last week.  The question that I (and probably millions of other people) couldn’t help but ask is, what does this mean for the market going forward? The second question I asked myself:  How well prepared will I be for whatever happens? Despite today’s surprise, in my relatively brief investing career of 3…

Day 81: How Dissatisfaction, Food Poisoning, and a TV Show Brought Me to Intermittent Fasting

Chris

So I have been doing Intermittent Fasting for over seven weeks now, and as you might guess from the rhyme I wrote about it a few days ago, I couldn’t be happier.  Also, as I suggested in the rhyme, up until recently I would not have wanted to talk about it, as a matter of pride or preserving my self-concept of not caring about such things (This blog post actually represents the first time I am openly talking about it… rhyme-free, of course).  After all, I’m athletic, I’m fit, I’m…

Day 80: Reaching for Satisfaction (Part 4)

Chris

By the title of this post, you can probably gather that satisfaction has been on my mind a lot recently.  It came back strongly today, as I was thinking about a tendency I have sometimes had to dwell on thoughts that do not feel good, as if they will do some good (they don’t). I realize this is a strong tendency in our world.  A lot of us spend a lot of time — as I have– dwelling on (excuse my language) vibrational shit.  It’s the dissatisfaction, the frustration, the…