Category Archives: true life 2008

Hello, dcblogs readers!

I see dcblogs.com gave me some link-love for the Mystery of the Frog in the Coffeepot. Come on in, pour yourself a cup of tea, have a cookie, and stay awhile if you’d like. Please, if you’d be so kind, leave your shoes out by the door. I’m too tired to vacuum again this week. Do be sure to check them for frogs before you put them back on, though – those little beasties seem to get into the damndest things around here.

The apex of my list-making career

I make lists. Lists of things to do. And lists of things to not-do .

Since we’re going out of town, and traveling to multiple places that involve multiple pairs of shoes, I needed to make extra-detailed lists to keep track of everything. I realized earlier that I’d made a list that referred to another list. That was silly, but not really noteworthy, until I realized that the second list actually referred to a third list. (And that list actually contained a sublist, although the sublist can’t technically, in my opinion, be considered a forth list).

I need to return to my lists, so I’m going to be lazy and refer you to another old post regarding lists.

Yesterday, when I was recalling a mostly-repressed memory of a training session gone wrong, I believed that I was the only one left in the organization who’d attended the session. I was wrong. I found one other survivor clinging to the life-raft of sanity.

Our memories of the session don’t quite add up. He insists that we weren’t actually instructed to puff up our to-do lists by writing down and crossing off bodily functions. It was all about rewording everyday interactions to give yourself “forward momentum.” Thus, you were supposed to notate something like “grunt hello at supervisor before going face-down in coffee” as “interface with superior and debrief for day ahead.”

It was still an incredibly stupid, and expensive, waste of time.

That seminar may have made me the person I am today. Or not. I’m really reaching today, aren’t I?