A Long overdue goodbye to Summer

Even though I haven’t been motivated to vent my spleen in a while, I’m hammering out this post because we apparently have a new policy at CN where you could lose your blog space if you don’t post periodically or frequently enough or something.

Don’t feel neglected readers, I haven’t been posting on social media much either.   On Facebook, if I post anything too liberal, my right-wing boyfriends come out of their basements to set me straight.   And if I say anything that doesn’t perfectly align with the lefty talking points, my SJW girlfriends put me in check as well.

It. is. Exhausting.

How was your summer?  Mine was meh.  The weather this summer was, to use the technical term, sucky. For every decent weather day, there were two rainy, humid or hot as hell days. There weren’t as many sit on the front porch and enjoy my coffee (or back deck and wine) moments like last year.  Because the weather wasn’t favorable, it wasn’t always possible to let the kids spend time in the backyard burning off energy.

Heard a crash at 3 am and found this!

We spent a considerable amount of money trying to get this house in shape for if when we finally pull the trigger and decide to move.  We love our house and our neighborhood, especially now that Portage Park is starting to become a little more trendy.  But the house has some warts and with two growing kids, the thought of sharing the largest of 2.5 bathrooms with them doesn’t appeal to Nightingale.  And there’s the school thing.  Our neighborhood school is okay but not great.

On the other hand, would God put a Binny’s and a Culvers around the corner from us if she wanted us to move!  Besides, we don’t know where to move.  We don’t have any ties to any particular suburb here and a better school would mean less home than we have now or a much bigger mortgage.  Nightingale’s family is mostly in Memphis and we wouldn’t fit in there.

Gonna need a little more than duct tape to fix

A big change occurred at the office at the start of summer.  By that I mean I no longer work at an office.   One of the other work groups expanded and needed my seat.  The dude in charge of office seating asked if I really, really, really, really needed a seat in the office.  In spite of him being subtle, I was able to discern that he would rather not try to find me a seat.  So rather than wind up in a broom closet, so now I’m 99.9999% WFH.   I’ve gone into the office a total of three times since Memorial Day.

There are ups and downs of working 100% remote.  When you are at the office but not at your desk, people assume you are somewhere nearby.  In the breakroom, bathroom, meeting room, out having a smoke (even though they know you don’t smoke) or just out to lunch.  Kidding; no one takes lunch in Corporate America.

But when you are home, if you don’t respond within one-tenth of a second to an email or Instant Message, you obviously must be in the backyard sipping margaritas and working on your tan.  How absurd is that?  I drink Manhattans, not margaritas.

On the other hand, it is nice not having an hour plus door-to-door commute.  It’s even nicer when my kids aren’t being douche nuggets and I can get drop them off at daycare and get back with a little time before I clock in so I can sneak in a choir like mowing the lawn.

Let me know how your summer in the comments below and thanks for reading.

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Every Couple needs a Secret Language

Every couple, gay or straight, whether married or in a LTR, needs their own secret language. I’m not talking Lovey-Dovey baby talk but some simple words, phrases and even gestures that seem straightforward to circumstantial eavesdroppers, but have a clandestine meaning to you and your partner.  Think of these as your safe words for non-sexual situations.

You can just feel the passion burning between these two!    (Photo Courtesy of Ryan Lintelman)

One common event every couple goes through is a situation where one of you wants to leave a scene and the other may not or may not be aware. Nightingale and I don’t have this yet because we can still use the ole “gotta go, kids are about to have a meltdown,” but I have come up with what I call the Traffic Light Protocol.

• Green Light
• Yellow Light
• Red Light

Let’s say you are at a party and you are done doing the smiling and making small talk and just want to go home, but it’s not urgent. A Green Light phrase might be “honey, did we remember to take the laundry out of the washer? I don’t want mold to set in on my work clothes.”

In the Green Light phase, you’re telling your mate that they have about 20-30 minutes to make the rounds, talk to anybody they really want to speak with and then get out of there. You are going to turn into a pumpkin soon.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Same party but perhaps its even duller and you just are not feeling it. A Yellow Light phrase might be “honey, I’m pretty sure we didn’t take the laundry out of the washer and I don’t want mold to set in on my work clothes.”

This is a way to say okay wrap up with ever smooching and dealing you’re doing, but don’t engage anyone new and let’s get out of here in 15 minutes or less. You are turning into a pumpkin right now.

Now let’s imagine the same party but perhaps something transpires that irks you or someone is there that annoys you, or you’ve already given the Green or Yellow alert. A Red Light phrase might be “honey, our neighbor just texted that our laundry room is flooded.”

This is the 2-minute warning. You are beyond your limit and are going to turn a Rage Beast in 30 seconds or less. Wrap it up. No long good-byes.

One last thing: You must use these sparingly and judiciously. Also, you definitely should not use phrases that will blatantly insult anyone’s intelligence.

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The 7 winter coats you need to survive Chicago Winters – Men’s Edition

When it comes to winters in the Midwest, they are something else.  Not as brutal as Antarctica, Alaska or Greenland, but definitely a class of their own.  Chicago is particularly interesting because it is possible to experience all four seasons in one day, even in the winter!

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Now the Woman’s Edition will take bit longer to put together.  Each of the types of coat I showed has at least 3 counterparts in different colors, sizes and levels of cuteness.  In the meantime, check out Kathy Mathews piece she wrote for a while back.

 

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Parents need kidproof appliances, not refrigerators that can stream Game of Thrones

I like technology as much as the next geek, but only to the extent that it either really helps make my life easier, or it is really cool without a high cost of entry.  Alas there are some technologies out there that miss both these markers and will not be seen in our household any time soon.

I’m so gonna take over this house while you are sleeping Inferior Human

I’m sure there is some benefit to having a fridge with a video screen. “Playing music, displaying the weather, showing a calendar, functioning as a digital whiteboard, and putting together a shopping list are all activities that might make sense on a fridge. Some other features, like mirroring your TV or smartphone contents” might be beneficial if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

What parents really need are refrigerators and stoves that are smart enough to prevent little children from fucking with them.  We have a french door fridge and for a long time, moose and squirrel could only open the freezer section.  Now that they are older (two and a half) they can reach the fridge doors quite easily.  They have the dexterity to open the doors but lack the understanding that they can break any of the ridunkulously expensive drawers within.  Don’t bother replacing those because finding the one for your exact model will be a Sisyphean task and will likely cost almost as much as a new fridge.

I want a fridge that will lock. Yes I know you can buy locks but those look ugly and are a PITA to open and close when you want something. How about a simple code or button that locks the fridge so toddler cannot open them? The best that is available today is you can lock the ice maker. BFD!

As for ovens, is it too much to ask for ones that with oven door locked? How about burner knobs that can be disabled and re-enabled when children are around?  I’m really not gonna leave food in my stove the way I do a slow cooker and use my phone app to monitor, preheat and adjust the oven’s temperature.

 

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When you go from living Paycheck-to-Paycheck to Credit Card Cycle to Credit Card Cycle

Today is the closing date for my main credit card.  That means I start a fresh cycle and have already racked up $380 in charges for things I put off paying for until today.  That doesn’t include the $105 I spent on my belated Father’s Day present yesterday…I had to pull the trigger and purchase yesterday because it was on one of those One Sale per Day sites.

What you eat when you are poor

In my days of living paycheck-to-paycheck I would often play my special brand of  Credit Card Roulette, where you charge everything on one card one month, then a different card the next, paying off the previous card.  This kicked the expense down the road but never really resolved it.  You’d tell yourself that you wouldn’t spend as much the next month, but when your only expenses are food, rent and utilities, it’s kinda hard to cut back.  Oftentimes I would have to float a balance and pay interest.

My wife and I treat money slightly differently.  She absolutely abhors carrying a balance on her credit card and paying even a minute amount of interest.  I on the other hand, will pay interest to float a balance on a credit card rather than disperse large amounts of money from my bank account.  I might be “throwing away” money in interest payments but I believe that the credit card companies reward me with a better FICO score.  [Oh no wait,  that’s because I’m an old, straight, white guy.]

What you eat when you are less poor

The reasons for this are probably enough to keep a therapist in business for years, but my inner armchair psychologist says it’s because I have always gone through life without much of a safety net.  I came from a poor family and I didn’t get a good paying job right out of college.  I’m one of the very few “rags to slightly better rags” tales I know of.  I climbed the socio-economic ladder in sprints rather than steady strides, which means I struggled for years before making even decent coin.

The thing about being poor once upon a time is that you never feel like that time is over or very far away.  I always feel like I’m two unfortunate events and one bad decision away from being back to being broke.   So I pay a little interest because I figure if push comes to shove, and I have to choose between paying rent and paying my credit cards, I can always defer the cards until I have to declare bankruptcy.

 

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How to Repurpose a Crib Rail into a Gate

A few years ago, I decided to take a crack at fixing the gate between my deck and the side fence in my yard.   I didn’t understand why the previous owner had a gate there.  Now that I have children, I completely understand the need.  Alas, my attempt in 2014 sucked and I left it open until the rugrats arrived, then i just used a kiddie gate.  But the weather has not been kind to it, and it wasn’t very practical in terms of being able to access the water hose.  So I tried again.

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So far it seems to have done the trick.  The new gate is better looking and more functional than the previous kiddie gate.

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Is Gaming the System always a Bad Thing

One of the many shortcomings of Corporate America is the fact that coworkers just cannot help but wonder if their fellow brother-in-floresent lighting is getting away with something.

Gaming the system (also referred to as gaming the rules, bending the rules, abusing the system, cheating the system, milking the system, playing the system, or working the system) can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system in order, instead, to manipulate the system for a desired outcome …Wikipedia.

Simply put, Gaming the System is taking advantage of the rules of a system in a way that provides you an advantage that others do not receive. Rather than break the rules, there are often ways to take advantage of unintended consequences of the rule design. For example, you could eat lunch at your desk, and then use your lunch break to run errands or even go for a run.

Or get your car washed

I’ve always been a “never break a rule, when bending it will do” sort of person.   And to be honest, I’ve gamed the system many a times.  It basically come down to taking advantage of a situation and creating an opportunity for your personal benefit. Gaming the System is sometimes better marketed as Life Hacks which conjure a less negative meaning.

I think some people look at GTS the way most people think of Las Vegas:  if someone wins big money at the craps table, someone else has to lose money.  Other times people are just pissed they didn’t think of something first and now the loophole has been exposed and closed.

Let’s use an example from the ChicagoNow ecosystem.  Every month we have a contest for Best Post.  We can nominate one of our own pieces and one of someone else’s.  The rules don’t state whether we could just nominate two other pieces but that would be too unselfish AMIRIGHT.   I don’t usually participate but when I do, I ask a couple of CN blogger friends to nominate me with the promise that I will return the favor at their asking.

Is this GTS?  Probably.  Is it hurting anyone?  If you assume the system was set up with positive intent for the community overall, then “gaming the system” means working the rules of the system for one’s personal gain specifically at the expense of the community.  There are times when our Fearless Leader has to remind everyone that submissions are due because he hasn’t received any, so I don’t think that is always the case in my example.

For me GTS goes back to taking advantage of an unintended component of the rule design with the caveat that my gain is not severely impacting anyone else in a negative way.

What do you think?  Share in the comments.

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Why I’m renewing my Lincoln Park Zoo membership via snail mail

View image | gettyimages.com

The time has come to renew my membership to the Lincoln Park Zoo and I’m doing it the old-fashioned way: by mailing in my renewal application instead of paying online.  Why not use the modern convenience of online bill pay?  First, some context.

While I might have skipped a year here and there, I have been a member of the Lincoln Park Zoo since the late 90s.  Why am I a paying member of something that is free and open to the public?  I’d like to say it was because of my philanthropic side, but I cannot even spell that word.

In the beginning it was to save on parking at the zoo.  No I didn’t frequent the zoo very often like a deranged psychopath.  I played volleyball nearby in the evenings and the zoo removed the parking meters and started charging a hefty sum to park there.  It was a flat fee whether you got there when the zoo first opened or half an hour before they closed.   I don’t remember the exact cost but I was Hella Poor and making Diddly over Squat paycheck wise so this was valuable beer money going away.

One of my Vball friends clued me into the zoo membership.  For $30 you got a membership that came with free parking.  After a few weeks of volleyball the pass paid for itself.  So I bought and  renewed the pass for a long time.  the rates did go up of course.  I’m sure someone at the zoo noticed a spike in membership around summer volleyball season and adjusted accordingly.

When I switched from playing volleyball to running marathons, I still kept the membership because there were enough 5 and 10K races that started nearby to take advantage of the It was always still  a good deal and I could rationalize it by being all philanthropic to the zoo.

About that philanthropic thing:  I am aware that there are some serious ethical concerns about zoos and keeping animals in captivity.   I don’t know enough on this and am reading up,and at the moment addressing this aspect of zoos feels like it would be sticking my head into a hive of angry hornets and why would I want to do that?

Growing up in Humboldt Park, we didn’t really have a lot of spare coinage.  My friends and I would hop on the North Ave bus and head to the zoo because it was something free to do that got us out of the neighborhood. Yes we were free-range children.  Sometimes we’d try to get our visit in and make it back on the same transfer, but most of the time we made a day of it by going to the beach and/or walking through Old Town.

So for the moment, I’m of the opinion that zoos do more good than harm but am open to evidence of the contrary.

Oh and the The Reason I’m using snail mail is because I do not want this charge to appear on my credit card statement until the next cycle.

Now that I’m not running as much, and have all the expenses involved with raising two socially-conscious child with beautiful manners and high self-esteem it is a little tricky to justify the  $175 that would be required. [You need a Safari or higher level membership to get the unlimited free parking].  So my work around is to defer the payment as long as possible.

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Deleting everything in my Inbox and Not Feeling Guilty about it

So I use the email account associated with this blog (therunninggod@gmail.com) to subscribe to other blogs I like as well a few random newsletters like Tomshardware and How-To-Geek, along with my fair share of Nigerian Bank Scams and Hot Local Women who want to meet me. I generally do a good job of keeping up with my reading, especially when I have bouts of insomnia. This is what I call research and homework for coming up with topics for this blog.

However, now that the twins have arrived I don’t have time to keep up with it all. My inbox grew from 10 to 100 very quickly. When that happens the “Mailbox” app I use flashes “help me get to zero” which will archive everything based on some criteria, the default being Archive everything marked unread.

Here at ChicagoNow we preach the Generosity Trinity:

• Please like my FB Fan Page will do as soon as you like mine)
• Please follow me on twitter and subscribe (you betcha)
• Please like, share and comment on my posts (did I say please enough?)

Being catholic, even lapsed as I am, I’m programmed to feel guilty. I feel guilty that I don’t always take the time to simply click on the post so it gets my magical Pageview that will naturally propel it to the top 20 read blogs that week/day/month. Guilty that I don’t have time to read or comment.  Guilty that when I do read the post, I don’t delete it from my inbox because I want to comment but I need to do it as Mysteries of Life and can only do that from an ordinary PC browser, not the iPad Safari browser.  Guilty that I don’t have time to share. In fact, I only share a post when I really really like it or when I have nothing to share on my own FB Fan Page.

Of course after guilty comes denial, rationalization and a long nap. I was feeling bad about not keeping up with my subscriptions but then I told myself, hey half of these people don’t’ subscribe to your blog. In fact I was starting to have a little pity party because I see some bloggers commenting way more on other posts than on mine.

But then the words of our fearless and bearded leader Jimmy:

“Somebody will always have more page views than you, more followers and write a better post. Accept that. And then stop caring, because it won’t do anything but make you feel envious, which takes you down an unhealthy path.”

Jimmy is kinda ChicagoNow’s Yoda, though not as tall, and  to paraphrase Yoda: “unhealthy path leads to to the dark side. Dark Side means you fall down and hurt yourself.”

So this is where I would try to wrap this all up in a great after school special lesson learned thing.  Okay then.  The reason the other bloggers aren’t commenting and sharing my post is because they are not noticing them.  And they are not noticing them because I’m not writing interesting enough stuff to get their attention and promoting the fuck out of it.  So I’m just gonna have to get better.  So better that I’m in the top 10 every week.

Or I could just take that nap.

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Facebook Life Hack: An alternative to de-friending

Updated: When I started working on this post, it was as a compliment to my other Two for Tuesday post. However, after doing some diligent fact checking…okay I went to grab a screen capture and found that my information is now obsolete. Apparently Facebook changed things again!

Still the point in this post still stands. There are alternatives to simply unfriending/defriending someone just because they annoy you on Facebook. Note: the Facebook Action is properly called Unfriend, but it is referred to in social media jargon as de-friending.

People in the Facebook World tend to be reactionary. Over-reactionary in fact. Unless you only have single digit friends and they are clones of yourself, chances are one or more of your friends have a slightly different viewpoint, philosophy or Belief System on everything from key subjects (abortion, death penalty, politics, even sports team) to non-issues like whether ketchup belongs on a hotdog.

When you unfriend someone on Facebook this is what happens
1. That person does not appear on your Facebook friends list
2. You can see each other on Facebook search
3. You can still message each other
4. You can read the other person’s wall
5. You can still re-add each other as friends

Source:  http://sociolatte.com/difference-between-unfriend-and-block-on-facebook/

You probably never even realized that your friend feels differently than you because in real life, you don’t connect over your differences, you connect over common ground. You aren’t friends with Fred from your Softball League because you respect that his stance on government spending, while vastly different than yours, is well thought out and articulated. You’re friends because he can field a double play, picks up the first round and played wingman for you that time.

When you unfriend someone on Facebook this is what happens
1. That person does not appear on your Facebook friends list
2. You can see each other on Facebook search
3. You can still message each other
4. You can read the other person’s wall
5. You can still re-add each other as friends

Source:  http://sociolatte.com/difference-between-unfriend-and-block-on-facebook/

Then you find out that he doesn’t see something like the George Zimmerman Trial, Malaysian Flight MH17 or whatever current event is cluttering the news wires the same way you do. To each their own right? Except he also cannot seem to shut up about it either. If you defriend them on Facebook, you might regret it later when you see them In Real Life.

So if you want to not see rants from Uncle Racist or Cousin Tree Hugger or just not have your feeds cluttered with social political bullshit during the upcoming mid-term elections, you can hide the person from your feed.

I’m not sure if this can be done easily from a phone or tablet app so you might have to log into a good old fashioned browser to do this, but trust me: it’s worth it.

Step 1) click on your friend’s profile (or alternatively, hover your mouse over your friend’s profile)

Step 2) highlight Get Notifications

Step 3)  Choose the level that fits your needs: All Updates  |  Most Updates  | Only Important

Note:  as mentioned above, this refinement doesn’t work anymore.  Typical Facebook!  Back in the day, you could hover your mouse and choose See Less of/See More of a person.  Then they had Notification Settings.  Now you have to do an all or nothing.

I did find a workaround along with a few more great hacks at BuzzFeed, including a way to clean up your news feeds.  Click here while logged in to Facebook and you will be taken to a page full of friends you haven’t interacted with in a while. Click all of the ones you want to see less in your News Feed.

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